A Distant Shore

The iPad War of Words

2010-04-05T03:21:00.001+10:00

I've been devouring iPad reviews and articles in a fit of techno-lust, so I've seen about a dozen lists like this. I've also been reading many of the comments on the reviews and articles, and seen some of the same things cited over and over by the people who dislike Apple and/or the iPad concept.

I can't object to someone who says the iPad isn't for them. Or that it's a luxury they don't need.

Personally, I want Apple and the iPad to succeed commercially, but mainly because I've made a substantial investment in Apple products, and so I don't want the whole ecosystem to die. (As it almost did in the nineties.) I don't want Apple to destroy everything in its path. I just want it to keep motoring on as it has been the last few years.

But it is amusing (and occasionally alarming) to read the impassioned arguments of people who think *no one* should want an iPad. Especially when two of the most common objections they cite -- the threat of Apple's closed ecosystem and the lack of support for Flash -- seem a little absurd.

If you'll forgive a long-winded rant, here's why those two points bug me...

It's a closed ecosystem!

OK, for arguments sake, let's accept the unvoiced theory here that Steve Jobs and Apple generally are evil masterminds determined to enslave humanity and lead us to our doom. Does the popularity of the Mac, the iPhone and (possibly) the iPad spell the coming of the iPocalypse?

Reality check, people.

Apple computers currently make up about 10% of new computers sold. This is a recent high-water mark, and Macs still account for only about 5-7% of computers in use worldwide. If memory serves, the best they ever did was in the late 80s, when they peaked at about 15% of new computers sold.

The iPhone is phenomenally successful. Yet, Apple still trails RIM's Blackberry in units sold every year. And Android-based phones, in third place, are now the fastest growing segment of the smart phone market. And let's not forget that smart phones still make up less than 15% of all phone sales, although that portion is probably much higher in developed economies. Apple only competes in the smart phone segment. It's percentage of all phones sold of all types is around 1%.

(If you didn't know, Apple *is* the largest smart phone manufacturer by revenue. But remember that gross revenue depends on their products continuing to be in such demand that they can continue to get fatter margins on each phone sold. In other words, their lead in revenue could evaporate very quickly if they can't keep up the high demand for the iPhone. It isn't the same as having a lead in units actually in user's hands, which can only be eroded over time.)

The one market where Apple has achieved true dominance is in music players and music sales. iPods far outsell any competing brand, and the iTunes has eclipsed Wal*mart to become the leading music retailer in the U.S. But...

(a) Music players are truly a consumer electronics segment, not a computing platform. (The iPod Touch is blurring this line, but leave it aside for now.) It's hard to see how dominating the music player business leads to world domination. Or did Sony use the Walkman to secretly conquer all humanity in the 80s, and I just missed the memo?

(b) The amount of music downloaded illegally is still (by most estimates) exceeding the amount bought legally. So even if Apple is the largest seller of music, it still doesn't dominate electronic music distribution.

Now, the RIAA is marching forth in it's jackboots to stop illegal downloads, but you'll notice that Apple isn't aiding or abetting them. In fact, people seem to conveniently forget that it was Steve "The Devil Incarnate" Jobs who personally persuaded the major music publishers to allow the iTunes store to *stop* selling DRM-ed music and sell unprotected music files instead. In this, Apple has done more than any other company to fight the RIAA's march toward DRM and lawsuits. But let's not let inconvenient facts get in the way of our preconceptions about Steve and Apple, shall we? ;-)

Anyway, that does lead to...

(c) Music downloads, the one area where Apple is dominant, is *not* a closed ecosystem. Most music downloaded through the iTunes store is not protected by DRM. After Apple negotiated to remove it, a majority of new purchases are of DRM-free content, and a substantial number of people have replaced their previous DRM versions with non-DRM recordings.

Finally, let's put Apple's 'dominant position' in historical perspective. Remember IBM in the 80s? Microsoft in the 90s? Does Apple's current resurgence in any way approach the market dominance achieved by either of those companies? The numbers would say Apple isn't anywhere near it. As the commentariat keeps noting after one of Jobs' keynotes, Apple's influence is based on perceived product leadership and great marketing, not market dominance.

Even if it were? MS still completely dominates the business *and* home computing markets, but nobody seems particularly worried about this at the moment. The consensus would seem to be that monopoly positions in tech can be controlled or rolled-back -- by either market forces or government lawsuits -- well before world governments have to surrender to a dictatorship by a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Then there's Google, the 800 pound gorilla of the Internet in the noughties. It has control of things that would be terrifying if they were in the hands of a 'normal' company. We tend to let it pass, but only because of Google's current culture. What information does Apple control in comparison to Google? Music buying trends?

Back in the desktop computing world, the socialist libertarian wing of the Linux cult seems determined to view Apple's closed ecosystem as an existential threat. I can't tell you how many posts I read decrying the AppStore as an unacceptable way of controlling what users can put on their own computers, and what programmers can distribute.

To me, this would appear to be pure alarmism. Given Apple's market share, under what conceivable scenario is the iPad's success going to end the availability of Wintel boxes suitable for running Ubuntu? Exactly how will the iPad and AppStore "end freedom of choice in computing" and doom all programmers to enslavement by Apple's evil overlords?

Hey, if Apple's share of the phone or personal computer markets were ever to creep above even 20%, then I *might* start to take their yammering seriously. But now?

[Personally, I agree with the concerns about Apple's unpublished and inconsistent standards for approving (and removing) apps. But it's clearly a 'stupid management decision' thing, not a sinister mind control plot. And, while I hope they fix this soon, you could still make a good argument that the AppStore is the most 'democratising' thing to happen to programmers since the arrival of the Internet. The expenses involved in computer game production had long ago killed off the "two guys in a garage" success story, but the AppStore provided a platform where individual programmers and small studios had a chance again. And the near-zero cost of electronic distribution has benefited both programmers and consumers to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.]

In sum, it is hard to see how Apple's closed ecosystem represents a "threat" to anything at all. Especially when you look at the numbers rather than the hype. And, at present, Apple has an effective monopoly position on... nothing. In fact, it's not even close to having one. Anywhere.

Some people may not like closed software ecosystems, but it's just a personal choice not a moral imperative. The talkback rants that equate buying Apple products with sacrificing personal freedom are just unhinged.

...and it doesn't play Flash!

It's weird, but even the people who write detailed reviews of the iPad never seem to think this one through. They just stick in the obligatory "and it does not play Flash, which much of the web uses for video" quote without analysing it further.

Look, the largest video site on the web, YouTube, is immediately accessible from the iPad (just as it is from the iPhone). ABC, CBS, Vimeo and other major players will be accessible practically from day one. Hulu, the site every mentions as a possible deal-breaker, is known to be preparing to deliver content to the iPad as quickly as it can. Brightcove is quickly making technology available to convert the major Flash-based sites it supports to an iPad friendly format. The very existence of the iPad has started a web-wide stampede towards HTML5, so even smaller players are likely to have economical conversion method available to them soon.

The one area that might not be able to adapt quickly is Flash-based game sites. So, if you're addicted to Farmville, you may have an issue with the iPad.

For other users though... does anybody really care? How are they going to suffer? Within a year, very few major sites will not be able to show video to the iPad. So Flash might be a reason to hold-off on buying an iPad, but it certainly isn't a reason that the platform should fail.

The people that really blow my mind are some of the Linux fanboys. In one paragraph they'll be denouncing Apple as inherently evil for perpetrating it's horrible 'walled garden' / 'gilded cage' on an unsuspecting public, and in the next they'll mention the lack of Flash support. Huh?

"Apple is refusing to implement a proprietary video format and insisting that people use a non-proprietary web standard instead! Those bastards! Oh, wait..."

;-)

Anyway, I don't really mind if some people don't get, or don't like, or outright hate the iPad as a product. I don't care if a lot of people hate Apple and everything it makes! As long as there were just enough of us 'fanboys' out there to keep the Apple ecosystem vibrant, I'd be happy.

You see, I think I actually preferred being part of a small cult that "got" Apple -- which was still the feeling three years ago when I moved back into the fold -- to finding myself part of a mass consumer phenomenon that scares the bejesus out of so many people.

And maybe I shouldn't care if people who don't like Apple and its products jump on the Internet to stereotype and insult anyone who does like them. That really does bug me, though. It's like seeing Tea Partiers infect the technosphere.

A Trip to Perth

2008-04-27T01:04:00.012+10:00

Switch to Google Maps to view a larger version of this map.
I'm not up to writing many long emails or blog posts these days. But I did want to share a few photos from our trip to Perth last week, and the blog seemed a good way to do that. So here we go.

At the top I've put in a custom Google Map showing where the photos were taken. You should be able to zoom in and pan around in this map if you like.

In the first photo we have Rohan in the yellow cap and his mate Curtis in the blue. Curtis' dad, my mate Brendan, is in the middle. Brendan, his wife Jacqui, and Curtis used to live just around the corner from us in Canberra. We used to meet them for dinner every Friday at the Mawson Club. Very nice way to end the week. But they moved to Perth a few months ago, and we took the opportunity of the April school holidays to go out for a vacation/visit.

The next photo is part of the view from the platform we were standing on in the first photo. Just a nice shot of the Indian Ocean from some cliffs near their home.

Below that is all of us arriving at Kings Park, set on a bluff which overlooks downtown Perth. Here you can find one of the ubiquitous statues of Queen Victoria to be found throughout Australia. And below the statue is the view toward Perth from that statue. Gorgeous spot.

After that we have Rohan and Curtis flopped on the grass in the park for some tree gazing, and then the view of the trees they were staring at.

Then we get to the seascape photos. First is Rohan goofing off on the sand down in the Margaret River area. This is one of the several famous wine growing areas of Australia, located just a couple of hours south of Perth. Sadly, Anita and I weren't able to do the winery tours with a seven year old in tow, so we did the tourist stuff instead. We visited three of the big caves in the area, climbed the old lighthouse on Cape Leuwin, and strolled a couple of beaches. Very, very relaxing.

Well, we did end up sheltering in a gift shop at one cave for a half-hour as a big storm blew through. The whole place lost power. The good news was that we'd just come back from the 300+ stair climb down to a cave, so we weren't in the tour group that was down in the cave when the storm hit. The even better news is that we were just about to climb back into the car when the rain stopped us. Turned out we missed driving through a small tornado(!)

We spent the drive back to the hotel in Margaret River dodging downed trees and fording small rivers that had formed as flooded farm paddocks drained across the roadway. Rohan promptly declared the adventure "the best day of my entire life!"

I'll try to add a couple of photos of the MR trip later.

Next up is an 'arty' shot of some seaweed, and then a piccy of Rohan on the beach at Penguin Island, near Brendan and Jacqui's place. We took a glass-bottomed ferry over to see the fairy penguins, sea lions, pelicans and other animals inhabiting a few rocky islands just a couple hundred meters away from some seaside suburbs.

The final few shots are of one of our sunset fishing trips. Brendan has three rods, and so we spent most of our evenings at their house at their local beach watching the sun set and fishing for whatever was biting. Everybody caught at least one fish, although they were all too small to keep. The boys would fish for a bit, then run off to amuse themselves excavating in the sand until we made them go home.

Yes, it was as idyllic as it looks and sounds. In fact, I'm afraid I didn't get a picture of the dolphins that were cavorting in the shallows about twenty feet off shore. Too dark for my camera.

All in all it was the most relaxing time Anita and I have had in ages. And the really good news was that Brendan and Jacqui and planning to move back to Canberra this year, if things work out. Brendan just isn't happy with the job situation in Perth. Yeah, it would be nice to be able to visit them out there again (albeit very bad for my liver, given the amount of Victoria Bitter that Brendan and I put away over the course of the week) but we'd much rather have them back in Canberra. We miss the Fridays at the Mawson Club.

A Trip to the Snow

2007-09-09T23:14:00.000+10:00

OK, here is my first use of video on this blog. Our experiment with Rohan's blog worked well enough that I decided to give it a try.

Last weekend we had arranged to go up to the snow with some friends of ours. Saavan is in Rohan's kindie class, and they've been to each other's houses for "play dates". Ritu, Saavan's mum, told us she was planning on taking Saavan and his little brother Grish up to the snow, and asked if we wanted to go with.

Even though Anita and I had talked about doing something like that for years--the snow fields are only about a three hour drive from Canberra--we'd never gotten ourselves organised to go. Ritu's invitation gave us the little push we needed, and so last Saturday we all got up before dawn and bundled into two cars for the trip south.

Ritu was taking her mum and the kids up to Perisher, one of the well-known local ski resorts, where a free toboggan (sledding) hill was located right next to the parking lot for the lodge. The weather had been unseasonably warm and sunny, so this looked like our last chance to get up there before the big thaw. It turned out a lot of other people had the same idea.

Rohan was content on the ride both ways, thanks to the portable DVD player we'd bought for the long treks to Melbourne.We stopped at a small town about half-way to rent toboggans and chains for the tires (mandatory to enter the park). It was sunny, and warm until we were well up into the Snowys. Even when we eventually reached the snow line it was beautiful.

We ended up being guided off the road about two klicks from the resort by a crew of parking attendants who were marching down the road converting a line of traffic into a line of parked cars on the road side. A bus came up the line about five minutes later, just as everyone finished unpacking their gear, and we boarded for the short ride to the resort.

We had a great time sledding for a few hours, then stomped over to the lodge to get some snacks before heading home. We had planned to stop for a late lunch in Jindabyne, just outside the par, but the boys were so tired that Saavan and Grish were out cold by the time we got there. Ritu and her mum elected to push on home, but we stopped for pizza on the sunny deck of a local restaurant.

Long day, but a lot of fun. Anyway, with the overly long setup out of the way, here's a little video of the action...

The Week That Was

2007-04-08T00:34:00.000+10:00

OK, let's see...

About a week ago we finally managed to host our first ever Family Games Night. This is something Anita and I had been talking about doing for ages. We'd mentioned it to Anne Marie sometime last year and she was keen on the idea, so we agreed to try it when the timing was right.

During our rather damp multi-family foray to the beach a couple of weeks ago, Charlie was
trying to get Pierce (Damian and Heather's youngest) to sleep over in their cabin on the Saturday night. When Pierce decided he didn't want to, Charlie was devastated... until Rohan agreed to stay over instead. Peace was restored! Anita and I were a bit weirded out about having Rohan away from both of us for the first time ever, but if you're going to try something like that, having the kid all of 50 feet away in a cabin with other parents you trust is the way to go. They had a great time, too.

Anyway, after we got back, somehow the arrangement was made that Rohan could reciprocate and have Charlie stay over at our house. And somehow (husbands are never quite up to speed on how these things occur...) it was decided to merge that with the inaugural Rodrigues Macias Family Games Night Extravaganza.

So last Friday Anne Marie and Paul brought Charlie over, and Jacqui and Brendan came over with Curtis. Nibblies were set out. Pizzas were ordered. The adults grabbed some beer and wine while three boys went mildly berserk in our living room. And, finally, after dinner was had and cleared away, we pulled out some board games and had a go.

The funniest of the lot was the game of Cluedo. (The game is called 'Clue' in the U.S., and I have no idea why it is named differently elsewhere.) The three boys somehow latched on to the idea that you were 'winning' if you had a clue to reveal when someone made a guess, so they were competing with one another to reveal their cards whenever a guess was made. The adults eventually gave up on trying to educate them on the strategy, and had to settle for just ordering them not to show a card unless it was their turn. It was a hilarious fiasco. Rules were bent broken and mutilated, but everyone had a good time, which was the point.

The sleep over also went well. No dramas, apart from the boys staying up late thus and being a bit grumpy and tired the next afternoon. It's fun watching them have so much fun. Six is turning out to be a pretty good age.

The sleep over thing was aided by the fact that, out of the blue, Rohan suddenly was able to be dry through the night. A doc told Anita that this is largely controlled by a particular hormone, and will happen whenever the boy's metabolism starts producing it. Well, it must happen nearly instantaneously, because one month he had to be in pull-ups every night, and the next he's only wetting the bed about once a fortnight. (The irony here is that, as I was writing this paragraph, Anita was changing the sheets on Rohan's bed because he'd had one of his very rare accidents. Oh well.)

What else has happened lately?

Last Sunday we took Rohan to a birthday party for one of his classmates. They held it at Weston Park, where we hadn't been in almost a year. It's a beautiful place, set on a finger of land that projects into Lake Burley Griffin opposite the looming Black Mountain. There is a miniature railway that toddlers love, and a series of wooden tree forts built into several stands of trees right at the lake edge, and even a hedge maze.

The party was one where they'd hired a small business that specializes in hosting children's parties. One of the activities they had for the kids was spray-on tattoos. The kids could choose from all kinds of patterns, and the guy used an air brush and stencils to spray-paint them on wherever they wanted them. (They wear off after about two weeks, or wipe off with baby oil.)

Once they got the idea, the kids went nuts. The birthday boy, who was just turning five, had a big set of skulls across his back and wanted a ring of them around his belly button. Rohan had flames on one arm, a Batman symbol and a Celtic knot on another. Some of the girls had theirs brushed with glitter.

By the end, the adults who stuck around to chat we being lined-up by the kids, who wanted them in on the action as well. I ended up with a stylized dragon on my bicep, while Anita got a glittery rose on her forearm. We were joking that we should hire the entertainment for an adult party, as the tattoo thing was so popular, but given the way Australian's party when the kids aren't around I'm pretty sure that would result in some scandalous tattoo placement.

Speaking of partying...

Australia has Good Friday and Easter Monday as national holidays, so Thursday was going to be a big night for parties. There was a moderately rowdy one going on down the street from us when Anita and I went to bed. It's late, but just after we turn off the light we hear a voice that sounds much closer than people do when they pass on the footpath (sidewalk). Then we hear the unmistakable clump-clump-clump of someone coming up the stairs onto our front deck.

We both get up to see what's going on, and I turn on the light and open the door to see a twenty-something guy in a t-shirt and jeans curled up on his side outside our front door, talking to himself and sobbing.

We're both a little wary, concerned the guy might be on something other than alcohol, but he won't respond when we ask him if he's OK. It's a cold night (Fall is setting in early) so finally Anita goes and gets a blanket and throws it over him, while I call the emergency number. The guy just lies there sobbing softly. After about ten minutes a van with four cops pull up (overkill, but how were they to know?) and the woman in the group does the drill sergeant routine and gets our mystery guest to wake up enough to realise he's not in Kansas anymore. Turns out he's just really, really pissed (drunk), and had wandered away from the party up the road. They steered him to the van do drive him home and Anita and I had a laugh and went back to bed.

A bit freaky, but we're actually glad the guy collapsed on our porch. If he'd fallen asleep in somebody's back garden he'd probably have risked hypothermia before somebody found him.

Oh, we have now had our first successful family two-way computer video conference!! Take note all. Anita's brother Dave rang from Ireland because he wanted to try out Skype. We missed the call, but then when we got home we arranged to hook up with him and, using Anita's iMac, switched from simple voice chat to video. Worked great! The video was a bit jerky, but we could all see each other and the sound was very good.

Having our two families be able to chat, one in Canberra and the other in Dublin, Ireland, really showed that this was worth trying. It is *s0* much more immediate than email or even a phone call. Tonight as I was typing this I was interrupted by a Skype note from Anita's brother Mark, who must have talked to Dave and decided to get in on the action. We'll be trying to video conference with Mark, Li-Lin and their baby daughter sometime this weekend. (They live in Singapore.)

OK, Macii, time to get our act together. The Rodrigii are making you all look technologically lame. Get those video cameras hooked up, and download Skype! (Mom, make Paul do this for you pronto!) Peeps to whomever video chats with us first!

We've had several more of the usual Canberra 'small world' experiences in the last month. The latest was last weekend, when I took Rohan over to the video store and he insisted we walk across to the local comic shop, where we hadn't been in ages. We wander past a few guys sitting at tables playing the Marvel/DC 'Versus' card game when one of them looks up and says "Oh, hey Chris!" It's Chappy, a.k.a. Chris Chapman, the guy who is running the little roleplaying group I joined earlier this year. Turns out he's a "full spectrum geek" and makes the trip all the way down from Dunlop to House of Heroes just to play Versus. (For you D.C. people, this is analogous to a guy from Rockville driving to Fairfax City just to go to a comic shop. Except that in Canberra that's only a 20 minute trip.)

I'm enjoying being in a small group that gets along well, and where the guys are more like my gaming friends from NoVA. The D&D group I was with before had more crotchety personalities in it, and was just too damn big (ten people) anyway. The only somewhat weird bit is that I'm ten or more years older than the three guys I'm playing with. Chappy is putting the game on hold for a couple weeks in May when he gets married. The other two are both single, and Tim is one of those guys you half expect to remain single forever. So it really *does* feel like I'm back with the old NoVA gang, right down to the ages they were when we last played together. Now that I think about it, I realise I probably enjoy that aspect of it: gaming night is kind of like stepping back in time for me--a chance to revisit the good times of my youth. You don't get to do that too often.

Finally, back to more serious subjects.

I have to report that our son is picking up reading with simply astonishing speed. I mean, he may not be going any faster than any other kid his age for all I know, but I figured learning to read would be a slow, hard slog. Not so far. They do a very phonics-oriented thing at Garran Primary, and he was really excited when he started getting these little 'readers' (very small, simple books) to take home to read to us. In only a couple of weeks he's already sight-reading dozens of common words and learning to sound out others, and he loves trying to read the books that we used to read to him when he was little. I'm just over the moon about the whole thing.

Oh, I almost forgot! We had another first the other day. Last Wednesday was our first ever parent teacher conference at his school. Very cool and very weird at the same time. It made me realise that that whole early toddler time was well and truly behind us. I could almost see 'the school years' stretching out in front of us.

I really like his teacher, and she was very encouraging. Rohan has his issues, but he's doing so well at overcoming things these days I feel quite relaxed about it all. It seems we just need to help him a little bit, and he'll do the rest. Fingers crossed!

U.S. Image Abroad

2007-02-05T00:38:00.000+11:00

Earlier today Darryl and I were chatting on the phone, and he asked me how I thought the U.S. was viewed from overseas. That put me in mind of a piece I was reading on-line just two nights ago. It's a commentary piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, the main daily in Australia's largest city, discussing recent attempts by the media to analyse how Dubya thinks. If you're curious about how people view the U.S. here, I'd suggest skimming the article and then reading some of the *hundreds* of reader comments posted below it. While there are a lot of rants, they aren't coming from some wacko subculture here. Most are just average suburbanites expressing their opinion. A few of the comments are from stateside Americans, which adds a bit of back-and-forth to the discussion.

I can't speak with any authority on how America and American's are viewed in the rest of the world, but looking at how they are viewed Down Under will give you an idea how things are trending. Keep this in mind: the Australian public has historically, on average, had the most pro-American leanings of any of the industrialised countries. They followed the U.S. into Nam back in the 60s, primarily to ensure America's future good will. While many Aussies like to dis Yanks and uncultured boobs and oil-greedy gun nuts, the right-leaning side of the population (especially the older and rural voters) have strongly backed staying close to America, whom they view as a close cultural 'cousin' and as a 'big brother' who could be expected to step in and protect us from the feared 'yellow hordes' to our north.

And so, mirroring the politics of the 60s, the current (conservative) government of Prime Minister John Howard went out of its way to be forcefully pro-Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Howard was second only to Tony Blair in his enthusiasm for the project. In the next election his party campaigned in part on being the party that would have the best relationship with what seemed an increasingly conservative America.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Howard's closeness to Bush is now viewed by most political pundits as a liability rather than an asset, even with conservative voters. Reading the comments on the article will show you why. Sydney is generally middle-of-the-road, politically. It isn't rural Queensland, but it ain't all latte sipping tree huggers, either. If you're feeling bored, try to count how many pro-Bush comments you can find (that weren't posted by Americans) in that long list. I'd read dozens, and had yet to see *one*.

From what I can tell from here, attitudes in Britain are even more negative. Not surprising. Blair actually sent troops to the front lines, and so now has body bags coming home. Howard, while talking all gung-ho, pulled all Australian troops out of harms way as soon as the invasion ended. Clever little bugger, that Howard.

Finally, fair warning: if you are still attached to the idea that foreigners largely view America as "a shining city on a hill" (to use Ronnie's phrasing) and "the land of opportunity", or if you one of the (many) Americans who get irate at the idea of non-Americans having strong opinions on U.S. politics or foreign policy, DON'T read the comments. They will really ruin your day.

Oh, and if you read the postings and get confused as to who the players are, it may be in part because Howard's conservative party is called the Liberals. Go figure. The centre-left opposition is the Labor party, also known as the ALP, currently led by Kevin Rudd.

Turning Pro

2007-01-20T01:18:00.000+11:00

All right, it's time for the traditional "look at my new computer!" post. I'm late to the party, and I know some of you MMO addicts have killer rigs. But I haven't bought myself a new desktop since 1999 (yes, seven years) and this is a gargantuan leap for yours truly. So humour me, OK? ;-)

You can see what it looks like here.

Yes, after almost fifteen years of wrestling with the demon Windows, I've come back to the light side of the force. When Anita's desktop was dying back in November I started looking in to what to get her. I don't know what caused me to look at Macs again, but when I did I had to do a double-take. There were a number of features I liked (chief among them reliability and security) but the clincher was... price. Yep, not only is the build quality amazing, but most Macs are now *cheaper* than an equivalently specced Dell. No, really.

After Anita's 20" iMac arrived she was soon complaining that I was trying to steal her computer. It was more curiosity than lust. I just wanted to see what Macs were like these days. But the more I played with it, the more I started to re-think my allegiance to Windows. In the end, I did a lot of research and looking at pros and cons, and eventually decided it was time for to drink the Apple Kool-Aid again as well. I was planning to go for an iMac, in spite of some concerns about not being able to upgrade components later (not an issue for Anita, given how she uses her computer), but then I browsed the Aussie Apple site and stumbled on a 'refurbished' Pro they had for about 20% off list, and decided this was a sign from the gods.

And, oh my, you should see the thing. Outside it looks like a piece of sculpted industrial machinery. Inside it looks like nothing you've ever seen before. Can you imagine a computer that actually looks more slick with it's case *off*?!? Don't crack one open around an industrial designer. They'll try to kill you to take it from you, then install it on an alter and start sacrificing goats to it.

In order to tone down the cult factor a bit, I decided to pair it with the Dell monitor I'd been lusting after for a year. You can see that one here.

Mac devotees would see this as heresy, but it's a fabulous monitor at an unbelievable price. And, while I've kept the Apple keyboard (which is so pleasant to use that I'm liable to write even longer emails just to keep my hands on it) I decided to ditch the Apple Mighty Mouse, which is a bit fiddly, for my trusty Logitech trackball from my old system. As you can see from the photo, this assortment makes my desk look like a bit of a dog's breakfast (as they say here), with the black and brushed metal monitor looming over the compact white and clear plastic keyboard and the dark grey and red of the trackball. But if the aesthetics are a little off, the ergonomics are pure luxury.

Yes, I know Vista is now out, and that they've stol... uh, imitated many of the slick features of OS X, so I could have moved to a Vista box and had much the same experience. In spite of having to re-adapt to the Mac OS, and in spite of the 'software gap' between Windows and what is available for OS X, I'm happier back in Mac land. The maintenance overhead for our two Macs is so low compared to all the baby sitting required by Windows. And OS X performs well on machines that would never run Vista, even with the new interface enhancements disabled. I mean, why buy a monster box, only to slow it down with the most bloated and processor intensive OS ever written, you know?

Did you check the processor specs on the Pro, by the way? The thing is so fast it keeps warping into the future, and I have to wait a day to catch up to it. ;-)

No, seriously, the only component on my Mac that isn't state-of-the-art is the base option video card, which is just 'respectable' in the current crop out there. Of course, that still makes it fast enough to run even the most recent games at full res and decent frame rates, but I imagine Call of Duty with all the options turned up to 11 and running at max res might still slow down enough to cause you to back off a bit. No worries. If it becomes an issue, the card is always upgradeable.

<>

Back. Just realised I'd meant to download and install my favourite Java IDE (coding environment) to see how it looked on the new rig. Ooooooh, baby. As the developers among you will know, when working in an IDE you can never get enough screen real estate. Try a 24" widescreen at 1900 x 1220 @ 60 Hz. I fired it up and nearly had an orgasm. Look at all that space! Oh, and the monitor pivots 90 degrees, too. You should see the number of lines of code I can get on screen at once.

So, with all this hardware at my disposal, the question must be asked: why am I sitting here blathering away in a damn text editor! Possibly the least graphical and simplest program on the entire computer! Why!?!

Oh, that's right. That keyboard. Damn, but it feels good.

Something tells me I'm going to end up in a 12-step program for blogaholics.

- Christopher

We Wii, Monsieur

2006-12-08T00:16:00.000+11:00

OK, so our little family has momentarily catapulted ourselves out of the ranks of the pop culture illiterate and into the uber-hip elite, having secured a Wii on its (Australian) launch day.

I'll file a full report when we've had a chance to try it out for a week or two. Initial impressions? Well, it isn't a cure for cancer, or better than sex, but...

The wiimote is way easier to learn than a typical controller. Rohan, who is only five, took only a few minutes to get the general hang of each of the Wii sports games (and, except for golf and bowling, he'd never seen some of those sports played before). Anita, a complete non-gamer (in fact, practically the antithesis of 'gamer' until today), picked it up almost as fast.

And it's good, family-friendly fun. Seductively so. When I took Rohan off to his bath, Anita grabbed the wiimote and announced she was going to try her hand at the golf game. Rohan took the shortest bath in recorded human history (or tried to) and raced back to watch her finish the third hole, then demanded she stop and play tennis against him.

After we put Rohan to bed, I had no trouble at all convincing Anita to play a round of golf with me (the beginner game is only three holes). Get this: she won! And, no, I wasn't sandbagging. She beat me by one stroke, and it would have been more if she hadn't had an unlucky drive into the rough.

In short: buy that Nintendo stock. Hard-core gamers will give it a look and say "meh", but they're going to sell so many of these darn things that the hard core are going to be about 10% of their use base. Really.

Relaxing a little

2006-11-27T02:20:00.000+11:00

Good weekend. Would have been a great one if we hadn't all been fighting colds. R and I are past the worst of it, and probably a day out from full recovery, but Anita is dragging right now, poor thing.

Let's see. What have we been up to?

Thursday evening we were invited over to Damien and Heather's apartment in Sky Plaza for a Thanksgiving dinner. Really nice evening. Rohan and Pierce were both feeling off, but they did OK. We ate too much, sipped some champaigne, and talked into the evening. They have a nice view to the North and West, and a great balcony to sit on and view it from. If they ever get to move into that penthouse they wanted originally, I'll look forward to visting. The veiw would be spectacular.

Friday started somewhat nightmarish. I was up most of the previous two nights in a last minute push to put an application together for the CIO job at IP Australia. It had to be in by Friday, and it took me until about three that afternoon to finally whip it into acceptable shape and email it over. Then I had to throw myself in the shower as I had arranged to have coffee with my old boss Dan Collins over at IP a half-hour later. It was good to catch up with him, and he got a kick out of my new haircut, but he seemed a bit... worried, maybe. I think my putting in an application to, in effect, become his boss, made him feel slightly awkward.

I told him I was sure I was a longshot, and that I was applying as much for the experience and feedback from trying to get such a role as from any expectation of actually landing the job. Both are partially true. I think I'm a longshot to win it, but I have a decent chance of at least landing an interview, depending on how big a pool of outsiders the job attracts. And I don't just want the experience; I want the job.

The good news, kind of, is that the CIO role would probably pay about half of what I'll make contracting at Customs. So, either I get "ultimate power" and the title, or I get the money to start paying off the mortage and buying a few goodies. I feel like I win either way.

Saturday we went over to David and Ingrid's for their daughter's first birthday celebration. The usual crew was there, along with Damian and Heather and the kids. Hot day, but very relaxing. We all just sat under the trees in the shade and gabbed happily, pausing only to go get another beer or some of the huge spread they'd put on.

The first Ashes test at the Gabba had all the menfolk in a good mood. One bloke had a phone on the '3' network and had subscribed to their exclusive cricket mobile access, which meant we could just pass the phone back and forth to see what was happening. Felt vaguely wrong, though, as tradition dictates that men getting up for a beer are obligated to circle through the living room so they can come out and announce the current score to everyone. Technology ravages yet another sacred tradition in the name of progress.

Sunday Anita and I had decided was cleanup day. We only work well under pressure, so I came up with a plan and told Rohan that, if he was bored by Mum and Dad working, he should invite someone 'round to play. We eventually got his preschool buddy George's parents on the line and Edwina dropped him 'round just after we completed our panicked whirlwind "oh no, visitors are coming!" cleanup of the living and dinging room. In the end, we got about everything except the garage into acceptable shape.

Tomorrow it's back to the routine. Lots to do to start getting our act together for next year. Oh, and Christmas shopping. Argh!

Bikes, Planes and Automobiles

2006-10-03T00:12:00.000+10:00

We're between trips at the moment.

Last Wednesday we piled in the car to drive to Sydney for a two-day conference on ampetamine issues that Anita wanted to attend for work. Stayed in an odd hotel hard by the freeway, which meant Anita couldn't get much sleep. She had a great time at the conference, though, as she was able to network with people from all over Australia and beyond. She came home both nights tired but energised.

I spent Thursday and Friday looking after Rohan, which was easy enough as we were right next to Darling Harbour. There were fountains to look at, a big playground to play in, a pond to go paddle boating on, the monorail to ride, and lots of tourist attractions, so we had a ball.

Friday night we all collapsed on the sofa bed to watch "Pollyanna" on TV, which was fun for me as it brought back memories of my family gathered around the TV when I was a kid. We haven't done much of that at home, as things tend to divide up between Rohan's shows, Anita's shows and (rarely) whatever I'm in the mood to watch. Now, though, Rohan's at an age where we can start to watch more things as a family.

The job situation is evolving. Wednesday, just before we left, I received a 'mystery message' on my voicemail. Turns out I'm being headhunted. Glenn Clarke had just submitted my application to the ATO the day before, so here I am again with potentially two job offers on the table, and this time I wasn't even looking. Always two at once. Must be some Christopher-specific law of the universe.

Not much detail on the job so far. The recruiter, a guy named Ashley Brown from Spectra in Sydney, won't tell me much until we meet in person and I sign an NDA. On Friday, as Rohan climbed on the playground, we set up a meeting for Saturday the 7th in Canberra. I told him I was looking at an ATO job where the hourly rate would put me somewhere above 300K a year and he didn't blink, so it clearly is a big deal. I was talking about it with Brendan yesterday and he suggested something that hadn't occurred to me: the new ID card for access to social services. A multi-billion budget inter-agency project. And probably a soul-destroying death march as well.

Ashley was also clearly intrigued by my mentions of Glenn Smyth, my good mate from way back, so on Friday I called Glenn and asked if he was interested in talking to them. To my surprise, he was. We're guessing that the money on offer here was enough to lure he and Linda back from Adelaide for a while. Whaddayaknow.

I told Anita that I may well have lost out on the job by bringing Glenn to their attention, but I'm not overly concerned. I think the ATO one is more-or-less a sure thing, and, bad as the Change Program etc. may be, it is a devil I know. Matt is aware that I'm not going to allow it to consume me, or suck me into doing insane hours. On the other hand, the mystery job may well involve such broad responsibility as to demand 70 hour weeks. Glenn may well go back to that. I won't.

On Sunday it occurred to me that, in spite of the fact that Ashley says they're looking for one person to be "the guy" riding herd on several delivery firms, they probably really need a small team doing that job. I'm going to talk to Glenn about both of us pitching that concept to them. Glenn and I complement each other well, with different but overlapping areas of expertise. They may not want both of us, but they'll be better off with both of us. I'm going to call him tomorrow to see what he thinks.

In the meantime, I'm off to Darwin(!) early Wednesday morning for the current job. Ian Moss, who is responsible for managing the Open Source pillar for Asia Pacific, wants to hold a strategy meeting with myself, Mark Hessling (my teammate on the Assist Team, based in Brissie), and Mike O'Regan (my former boss and head of Open Source for Australia). Mike is stuck on an engagment in Darwin at the moment, so the proposed gathering in Sydney or Canberra wasn't going to work. I jokingly proposed going to him, as Ian is based in Kuala Lumpur and therefore Darwin is roughly situated in the middle of us all. To my surprise (and Anita's disgust) they thought that was a great idea. So, off I go, spending a long day's travel both out and back for a one day meeting on Thursday.

I don't mind. Only been to Darwin once, back in '96, so it will be interesting to see the Esplanade again. Anita is not particularly happy about me ducking out on her in the middle of school holidays, but she's in a forgiving mood after I took on the Mr. Mom role so she could do the Sydney conference.

In other news... the weekend before the trip we'd all popped over to The Bike Shed in Phillip, where Adril, the new office manager at Anita's work, works on weekends. He'd offered to help her get set-up with a bike, and as we had talked about buying one for some time now we decided this was an offer too good to refuse. We found her one pretty quickly, added a helmet, and that was that.

I told Adril I was stunned by the features on the bike, and he confirmed my impression: we spent about $350 for a bike that, ten years ago, would have cost you about $3,000. Front fork shocks, a shock absorber in the seat post, really nifty Shimano shifters and gears. This past Sunday we finally went out as a family to have a first ride around on the bike path up the street. Anita was able to get on and ride immediately, even though she hadn't been on a bike in over 30 years. That old aphorism really is true. You never do forget. We all have a looong way to go before we start taking rides around the lake, but it was a good start. It felt like a great way to start the Spring as well.

Buying Anita's bike made me think back nostalgicly to buying my bike along with Damien way back when. We're still waiting to hear if Damian and Heather are headed this way. Last we heard, just before we left for Sydney, their house was under contract again, and now they were waiting on visas. Heather asked if she could ship stuff to us, and Lord knows we have plenty of room for it in that garage, so we told her to send it on. Now it's just a waiting game.

Wow, Damien and Glenn both headed back to Canberra. Looks like were getting the band back together...

Rohan is still nuts over miniatures. After I (inadvertantly) turned him on to miniature battles a our local Games Workshop store, it has become his latest obsession. Not sure how long it will last, as he's really too young for the hobby, but he's having fun just slapping weird paint colours on to even weirder little dwarf and goblin figurines, so I'm willing to indulge him. Besides, I've discovered I find miniature painting to be a relaxing, almost Zen-like, way to pass the time.

The other thing we've been sharing is Miyazaki films. He loves "Spirited Away", as do I, and he'd asked to take it out again when we last went to the video store. I also picked up "Howl's Moving Castle" which had just appeared on the one week loan shelves, and I got Anita to watch it with me last night. Wonderful film. The war theme is not something I want to expose Rohan to at his age, so he doesn't get to see that one yet. But I should probably considere buying copies of most of the Miyazaki classics, as I'm certain to want to watch them over and over again through the years.

OK, that's enough for now. Off to bed.

Desks and Cars

2006-07-03T22:51:00.000+10:00

After retrieving Rohan from preschool, I made the mistake of mentioning the idea that Anita and I had discussed about converting his "do room" into a shared office for he and I, giving Anita full run of the current study. He thought that was a great idea. In fact, he wanted to move things around right now.

I decided it would be easier to go along with him than try to distract him, so rearrange we did, moving his little desk and mine into the Do Room over the course of about 40 minutes.

After that, I persuaded him to walk up to Woden so we could go to the movies. The Disney/Pixar film "Cars" was showing, and I'd been planning on taking him to see it since before we left for the U.S. Good movie. The computer generated animation is becoming so detailed and... Intricate, I guess, that it is just stunning. Stadium scenes that, in a conventional animated movie, would have had the crowds indicated by little dots of colour perhaps, were in this movie comprised of thousands and thousands of fully detailed and rendered animated anthromorphic cars filling up the seats from trackside up to the rim. And the scenery in the "out West" scenes... amazing.

It was fun taking him. He's old enough now (and the movie was action-filled enough) that he watched it through without getting too bored for too long during the dialog scenes. He was happy and polite throughout the whole trip. Affectionate, too, even pulling up the arm rest of the seat to curl up against me when he got a little tired. One of those rare times with a five year old when I could just relax and enjoy being Dad instead of trying to keep him out of mischief or battling his moods. Thanks, Rohan. I needed that.

After waking me up at 5:30 this morning, the Small Boy fell asleep on the couch a little after eight as Anita was trying to feed him some dinner. I carried him to bed and tucked him in. I would have liked to crawl into my own bed at that point, but too much to do (like catching up on blogging!). Ah, well. No rest for the weary. Not this year.

Let the Bidding Begin

2006-07-03T22:11:00.000+10:00

My first day 'at home'. Rohan woke me up at 5:30 this morning, and then I was up with him until Anita took him off to preschool on her way to work. Instead of jumping in to my huge 'to do' list, I collapsed back into bed for what was supposed to be a quick cat nap.

My phone woke me at 11:00. Mike O'Regan calling to see if I was back in town and, if so, what my plans were. I told him I have a meeting scheduled with Jeff Le Fevre at 10 tomorrow (Tuesday), but Mike knew about that and planned to be there as well. I'd set up the meeting with Jeff after the last Unisys town hall meeting--at John Larkin's suggestion--because Jeff has been trying to get across the biometrics stuff for the DIMA bid. Since I might need to do that as well I thought he'd be good to talk to.

Mike then told me something I already knew: that Unisys had won the DIMA bid. I'd seen the ecstatic email from John the night we got back. That means John is going to be expecting to have me as a resource on the project, and will complain bitterly if I'm not. I was busy resigning myself to discovering the pathetic foibles of yet another government IT department when Mike dropped the other shoe: I've been nominated for the so-called "Assist Team" for the Open Source group for Australia. That would put me outside John's reach, as I technically belong to Open Source, not the Federal Government area that John is managing.

Mike, who is as easy-going and considerate a manager as I've ever worked for, indicated that the decision was up to me. It may not be that simple, but at least I know I'll have considerable say in the matter.

So, what do I want to do? At this point, I have no idea. Not enough data on either position. I'll be heading in to Unisys tomorrow to talk to Mike and Jeff and see what I can find out. I've been mulling things over all day, and I think it will come down to which is more likely to lead to a managerial (decision making) role within Unisys. I've decided I'm not interested in spending any more of my career as a techo living with other people's decisions. I need to move into a role where I have some degree of overall strategic control over things. If either project offers me a leadership role, my decision is easy. If both do, I'm likely to go with the Assist Group just because I believe in the Open Source push, and because I could really use a break from screwed up government departments, and because I'm not really that keen on diving in to another deeply technical area (biometrics) when I'd rather be working at a strategic level.

If neither opportunity offers a stepping stone to management, then I have to take a serious look at getting out. I like Unisys, and so far it's been good to me, but I have to get that first rung on the management ladder, and soon.

It occured to me that, if both the DIMA project and the Assist Group are having a hard time staffing up internally [very likely] then I may be able to negotiate with both sides and create a kind of bidding war for my services. I have the leverage. Hmmm.

Little Blue Soccer People

2006-05-13T23:05:00.000+10:00

Today was Rohan's second week playing soccer. And a grey, cold miserable morning it was. The first week was cold, too, but last Saturday the sun burned off the fog by about 8:15 and it turned into a beautiful morning. No such luck this time, as it stayed cold and grey all day.

Fortunately, the kids don't seem to feel the cold as much as the adults. Well, some do, especially if they're tired. Rohan fared well enough, cold-wise, although his soccer skills have a looong way to go.

I'm afraid I haven't done well at my manly duty of indoctrinating my son into the world of sport. Rohan clearly thinks soccer is just another social gathering with uniforms and a ball. He is happy enough to run around on the field chasing the other kids, but actually contesting for the ball isn't really his thing. He'd much rather find another player to talk and goof-off with while the others run themselves ragged chasing the ball across out of bounds and across the next two playing fields.

Which is fine, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I want him to be a bit competitive eventually, but at this age all they're concerned with is having fun and learning to kick the ball.

The Woden Valley soccer club really does this right. They don't assign kids to teams for the under-6 age group. The kids just all show up at 8:00, and are divided more or less randomly into teams of four and then shoo-ed out onto a big field broken up into dozens of little mini-fields with small traffic cones to play free-form games of four-on-four. Two teenager volunteers from the soccer club are assigned to manage each 'game', handing out different coloured shirts to each 'team' and keeping all the kids involved in the game.

OK, so now I'm a 'soccer Dad'. Why does that make me feel so... old?

Well, not 'old' exactly. Just much too Dad-like. With a toddler I could maintain a vague "hey, I'm still new at this" attitude and somehow pretend to myself that I was really no different from the guy I was at 23.

But when I'm carting a 5 year old to soccer? Uh-uh. There is no escaping it. I am officially and forever a real 'Dad' now.

And a really cold one at that.

Comic Pursuits

2006-04-29T22:47:00.000+10:00

My son is doomed. By me. I am completely unable to resist the temptation to use him as an excuse to revisit the pleasures of my youth.

Case in point: comic books. Lately, for various obscure reasons, Rohan has become interested in super heroes, including Spider Man. I don't think he's even seen a Spider Man cartoon (and the movies aren't suitable at his age), but he's gravitated toward clothing featuring Spider Man logos and the like.

So, this week I distracted him from some mischief by mentioning that I had some Spider Man comic books we might read together. He was baffled at first (having never heard of or seen a comic book before) but jumped at the chance anyway. Then I mentioned that there was a comic book store nearby in Philip, just across the way from the video store we frequent.

Well, that was it. He was obsessed with getting his own comic book at that store. So, today, I bundled him in the car and we headed to "House of Heroes" to check things out.

Talk about nostalgia. The place looked exactly like comic book shops in the U.S. Perhaps that shouldn't come as a surprise, but since I haven't been in a comic book shop in Australia before I still tend to associate comics strongly with being a twentysomething back in D.C. Stepping through the door of the shop was like stepping across continents and back in time, all at once. The feeling was so powerful, I nearly teared-up.

I didn't have time, though, as I had to chase a five year old around and make sure he didn't damage any valuable stock. He doesn't read yet, so he was just looking for familiar pictures. We did find some Spider Man titles, but just next to them was an issue of "Teen Titans Go!", a comic based on the TV cartoon series that airs on the Cartoon Network cable channel. Rohan loves the Teen Titans show (not my fault, although I happily watch with him, as it is pretty well done as those things go) so he decided that was the better option.

Great, I thought, now it's my turn for a browse. But it was not to be. He was near to accomplishing his mission, which was to buy his own comic, and was not going to stand around while Dad poured over graphic novels and venerable Marvel titles. So I gave in, helped him to buy the comic, and off we went. The guy at the counter--who looked more like an aging bikey with his bald head, grey goatee, black t-shirt, and gold earring--was very helpful, even handing us a brochure for an event called "Free Comic Day" on next Saturday. Hmm.

I'm not sure Rohan is all that ready to go geek just yet. It's more about getting something new than actually being "in to" comics at this point. However, I'm sorely tempted to schedule a trip with him to the comic shop once a month or so, just to indulge myself.

"But, Anita, Rohan really wants to go..." ;-)

We'll see.

Catching Up

2006-04-14T16:09:00.000+10:00

Odd, isn't it? I finally publicly announce my blog, and promptly stop updating it for the next couple of months. For some reason I found myself more interested in posting before I had any readers. I suspect that now I feel some pressure to "do something" and thus have started procrastinating. It isn't "just for fun" anymore.

Whatever. I have a lot of catching-up to do, so I'd better buckle down and get to it. I don't want to get caught up composing another epic, so I've told myself to do it a bit at a time. Multiple, short, topical posts, instead of one long one. Somehow I doubt I'll have the discipline to stick to that, but I'm going to try.

Three Web Thingies

2006-02-22T01:00:00.000+11:00

I’ve had one of those evenings when I get distracted by stuff on the net and get absolutely none of my planned work done. OK, that happens almost every night, but this time was slightly different in that the stuff that distracted me was actually worth being distracted by. Or, I tell myself that anyway. So, in an exercise in self-justification, I’m spamming you all with my handy little discoveries so that you can help ease my guilt by telling me how really wonderful and useful they all are. (That’s your cue, guys. Got it?)

Feeds in Firefox

Assuming you’re using the Firefox browser (and if you’re not… WHACK!... there’s one upside the head) I just figured out how to use it with sites that provide RSS feeds.

[At this point I’m absolutely certain that one or two Firefox gurus among you are saying “WHAT! It took him that long to get THAT?!?” I can also all but guarantee that the rest of the list is saying “RSS feeds? I think I’ve heard of that somewhere….” Sorry. It’s an age thing, guys. Most of us are not hip to it for the same reason we all don’t have a My Spaces accounts and we all still primarily use old fashioned email instead of instant messaging. But I digress…]

Point Firefox at any site that offers a feed. My blog is one. Notice that when you are viewing a site with a feed on it that up in the Firefox address bar that there is a little icon that looks like a radar dish over in the right hand side of the address field. Click that little doohickie to create what Firefox calls a “Live Bookmark” and save it like you would a regular bookmark. Now go find that bookmark and click on it. If it worked, clicking the live bookmark will not take you directly to my site. Instead, it will show you a dynamically updated list of links to the last few posts on my blog! Click one to jump to that post. Neat, huh?

Researching this was prompted by a comment Eric made after I advertised my blog site. He noted that he’d prefer an email, because he just wasn’t going to go out and check my blog site over and over again to find out if I’d posted recently. I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I joked that he needed to get into the 21st century and start using a feed reader for these sorts of things. Now I was joking, because I knew from personal experience that having to have a separate app just for RSS feeds is bit too ‘hard core’ for most of us. But then I vaguely remembered that Firefox had something for this, and went to check it out. OK, it isn’t the same as getting an email update, but it’s better than nothing (and if all of you lazy bums follow this advice, then I don’t have to send out reminders to read my blog! ;-)

Bookmarking in Magnolia

OK, now I’m going to do a 180 and show you a way to stop using a feature in your browser: ordinary bookmarks!

Magnolia (http://ma.gnolia.com/) is a ‘social bookmarking’ site. Translation: it is a web site that lets you store and manage your bookmarks on-line. Sounds stupid (that was my initial reaction) but it’s one of those ‘religious’ things. You know, like cell phones, or girlfriends. You will swear you don’t need one and that people who are addicted to them are all morons… until you get one yourself that you like and undergo a sudden ‘religious conversion’, whereupon you suddenly can’t live without them and in fact start proselytizing to everybody about how great they are.

[I seem to be on this “religious analogies” kick tonight. Apologies. Not sure why…]

The plusses of using Magnolia? Get to all your links when you’re away from your home PC (e.g. at work). Search your links based on your tags. Find links other people have saved in Magnolia using the same tags, to find related sites. Share links among ‘groups’ of people with common interests. Don’t worry about loosing your links if your PC crashes. That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

The original ‘breakthrough’ site in this space was Delicious (http://del.icio.us), which not only started the social bookmarking trend, but also fired-up the huge Web 2.0-ish trend around tagging (or maybe that was Technorati, I’m not sure). I’m not going to explain tags in detail, as it will sound even stupider to the uninitiated than social bookmarking does. If you’re curious enough to play with Magnolia or Delicious for an hour, you’ll just have one of those ‘aha’ moments and suddenly grok tagging. For the sceptics among you, I’ll note that the creator of Delicious, who started it as kind of a hobby, has just sold out his deceptively simple little web site for a tonne of cash and is now independently wealthy.

Why Magnolia instead of Delicious? Usability. Delicious works, but is clunky in parts and not terribly attractive. Also, since the guy sold the site, a couple of features have been off-line for maintenance for a while. I’m suspicious of when it will be back up to full functionality. Magnolia is just ‘slick’, and everything works beautifully. I’m into ‘user experience’ so I voted with my feet (er, “bookmarks”) and went with Magnolia.

Magnolia will allow you to easily upload all the bookmarks you already have in your browser to the web site, so you don’t have to ‘start from scratch’. Note that, if you collect a lot of links (I’m closing in on 500) the upload feature will take a while. Send the file and then check back in an hour or ten. This is because Magnolia creates and stores both a miniature image of each linked page and a full copy of the contents at the time you create the (Magnolia) bookmark, so there is a lot of back-end processing happening after the upload.

[And, just in case you’re wondering, no, you can’t use Magnolia to store the RSS feed ‘live bookmarks’ I showed you how to create in the first tip. Magnolia only works with standard bookmarks. You would use the RSS ones only within Firefox.]

Wiki

Here’s yet a third thing you can put alongside RSS and ‘tagging’ in the folder labelled “things old farts like us generally just don’t get”: wiki. Some of the more techno-literate among us may use wikis all the time (hands?) but I’m betting most don’t. The ‘poster child’ for wiki sites is, of course, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), the mammoth on-line encyclopaedia built and maintained by armies of amateurs around the globe. I won’t get into the merits and (many) flaws of Wikipedia, as it is the underlying idea of the wiki I’m going to go on about here.

The basic idea of the wiki is a web page that is editable right in the browser, by anybody. If you are looking at an entry in a wiki and spot a mistake, you can just click a link or button that will allow you to edit that page and correct it, right there in your browser, and see the change saved immediately.

Now why would anybody build such a thing? Well, for ‘living’ information (things like product documentation, project plans, etc.) this has huge productivity advantages over other solutions. No, really.

Think about any project you’ve ever been a part of at work that involved writing up project documentation. If you write those documents as Word files you end up emailing them back and forth, then going through painful contortions to keep track of updates and who has the current version. With email (or forums) you can dynamically discuss changes ad nauseum, but you end up having to go back to a (Word) document to actually make the changes. Then, when the document is signed-off, you should, in theory, publish the changes someplace easy to find, like on the company intranet. But in reality that almost never happens, and so, next year when somebody wants to find why a certain decision was made in your project, they have to go on this ridiculous hunt to locate the document(s), which are always buried deep in the corporate file system in some obscure folder structure that is completely opaque to anyone with a brain, then dig through the Word file to find the right information.

In a wiki, the document is always on-line and always just in one place and always up-to-date with the latest changes. And everybody who is looking at the wiki can act as an editor, fixing things immediately, rather than funnelling changes to someone who has the document. That tends to have lots of cool side effects, like actually seeing people update things of their own volition, instead of the document author having to stalk the floors trying to bribe or bully people into reading/editing/contributing to/approving his or her work so that they can get the thrice-damned thing signed-off.

Now, at least half of you are freaking out at this point thinking something along the lines of “That’s insane! If we let just anyone edit a document at any time, all we’ll end up with is a giant pile of crap!” In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way. You get a trade-off, of course. Quality is uneven, depending on people’s editing skills, but the gains you get from having a living document always available on the intranet always (IMHO) far outstrip the (imaginary or minor) issues that crop up from letting everyone play with the text. And modern full-feature wikis come with access permissions (so you can restrict reading and editing to certain groups of people) and full versioning (so you can recover an older version of a page if it is accidentally or maliciously deleted), so you aren’t really working without a net.

Wiki, like RSS and ‘tagging’ sites, are one of those trendy Web 2.0 things. Unlike the other two, though, wiki generates much stronger negative reactions from people, and the love-it-or-hate-it profile tends to break down by personality type rather than age. Relaxed, easygoing, optimistic and people-oriented types tend to love wiki. Uptight, control freak, and cynical types tend to loathe it with a passion.

Personality wise, I’m generally in the latter group, but I’ve managed to overcome my initial impression and looked at it objectively. My conclusion: my fears were largely groundless. For collaborative content creation, wiki just rocks. Now, if you personally don’t like ‘collaborating’ on work, well, that’s your problem, not the wiki. It’s just a tool. A tool that I personally hope will one day spell the end of !*%#$-ing bureaucratic MS Word document editing that wastes so much time on software development projects.

TenFootWiki

Now, doing another 180, I’m going to point you to a wiki that is intended solely for single person use. Why, you ask? Because (a) I’m a subversive bastard and (b) the particular use it’s put to is pretty cool. It’s a wiki that a tabletop GM can use to record and manage all the bits and pieces of information about their game world. This one is built by well known RPG web guy Uncle Bear, and can be found here: http://www.unclebear.com/tenfootwiki/

If you follow that link, you’re looking at the wiki. Just start clicking stuff and rolling over entries to see how it works. If you want a copy to use it yourself, just hunt around for the entry entitled “About GTD TiddlyWiki”. There is a Getting Started section in that. Follow the instructions in the first sentence to copy the html file to your PC. Guess what? You now have the whole thing, ready to run. Nothing else needed. No, really! Locate the html file you saved to disk and open it in your browser. Start editing stuff. You’re off and running.

[Note that, if you actually want to start using it in anger, start with a fresh copy of the file and rename and file it away as appropriate. You can create multiple personal use wikis (for multiple campaigns, say) just by making a copy of the original file in a new location.]

Now, most (all?) of us no longer run any tabletop RPG campaigns, but I’m passing the link to the TenFootWiki more so you can see the potential than because I think it is something you need. For example, TenFootWiki was built by customising GTDWiki, which was created to support people who use a certain style of managing “todo” lists, and GTDWiki is itself a customisation of the original, general-purpose TiddlyWiki. The point? You can relatively easily customise any of the versions here for use as a personal information base for whatever it is that you need to keep track of lots of notes for. Gardening, home maintenance, terrorist cell operational planning, whatever.

…and with that, I’ve typed myself into exhaustion. Which will come as a relief to all of you who struggled through this far, no doubt. ;-)

Hope some of you found this interesting, and perhaps even useful. Now I’m for bed.

- Christopher

The Sun Game Server

2006-02-18T23:11:00.000+11:00

Last June I was in San Francisco for the annual JavaOne conference, where about 15,000 Java developers assemble to totally geek-out for four days. One of the most entertaining sessions I went to during the conference was by a guy named Jeff Kesselman discussing a new technology Sun was developing in Java called the Sun Game Server. All the sessions were recorded, and are now available on-line (in a slide show plus synchronised audio and text format). You *may* have to register on the site to view it, but this is no big deal. Takes no real time, they won’t redistribute your email address, and all they’ll use it for is if you want to sign-up for some Java development newsletters (which you don’t have to do to register).

Presentation on Sun Game Server at JavaOne 2005
http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2005/coolstuff/

The presentation should be at the top of the list on this page. The talk runs about 35 minutes, plus another 20 of questions that you can skip unless you’re really interested.

If you enjoy MMOs and/or software development, this presentation is a MUST SEE. I’m not kidding. Kesselman is entertaining, in a very geeky way, and you will (well, I think you will, I did) get a real eye-opening insight into the economics and technical problems of MMO games. If you’re not a Java geek like me, his claims that they’ve cracked these issues may sound like a lot of pie-in-the-sky promises. It’s not.

I may not be a gaming expert, but I know EXACTLY what is possible in Java, and he is NOT bluffing. Before the end of the presentation I was thinking “Well, DAMN! If they get this to market before an alternative shows up, they are going to friggin’ OWN the entire MMO back-end development space.” I remember thinking that, if they did go forward, I was going to have to have a real hard think about switching careers and hooking up with one of the small game developer shops in Australia as a Java guru to help them adapt to the language and platform. No, seriously, I might well try it. God knows I don’t want to keep helping moron middle managers screw up enterprise software projects for the rest of my life.

It’s actually too bad you can’t see Kesselman giving the talk. Imagine Eric’s old roommate Dave Allison from Va Tech and you’re pretty close. If you don’t know Dave, just picture your stereotypical ageing tabletop gaming geek. Rotund, black plastic rim glasses perched atop a bulbous nose, bad combover haircut, and wearing clothes that scream “polyester”. He no more stepped on stage and opened his mouth than I all but burst out laughing, thinking “I must have played D&D with this guy! I’m sure of it!” But he’s also one damn smart cookie, and lacks the belligerent “I’m smarter than YOU are!” attitude prevalent among hard core D&D-ers and grognards. But I digress…

I only remembered this presentation by accident, when I stumbled across the links to the streamed sessions on the Sun site. I then realised I hadn’t heard anything further about the technology AT ALL. I searched and couldn’t turn up much of anything, and started to wonder if Sun had killed the whole project or something. Then I finally found the following forum discussion and an article that says what’s happening, more or less. Short answer: wait for the Game Developers Conference in March for this to (finally) go public again, probably with a free preview dev kit available around that time.

Mysterious Discussion on Java Games Online Forum
http://www.javagaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=11784.0

Article on What to Expect
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1418&Itemid=32

Interesting side note: after JavaOne wrapped last year I met Charlie for dinner and drinks. We went to a brew pub near where I was staying, and during the course of the evening I ranted on about the Kesselman presentation and how it could revolutionise the entire industry and yadda-yadda-yadda. It didn’t occur to me until after I was back in Oz that Charlie only listened and didn’t really say anything at all. I emailed him a couple times to ask about it and got complete radio silence. Either he thinks I’m being an idiot and doesn’t want to say so, or… can you say “NDA”?

;-)

- Christopher

More Rohan-isms

2006-02-14T01:08:00.000+11:00

Tonight at the dinner table, Rohan decided to pretend that he was going to eat Anita rather than his dinner. So Anita tries to get him to stop goofing around and eat.

Anita: Rohan, stop it. We don't eat people.
Rohan: Well, aren't people meat? I mean, you could cook them up and there would be meat just like animals have.
Anita: Well... we don't eat them anyway.
Me: That's right, you don't cook and eat people!
Rohan: But... can't we eat people that nobody in the whole world likes?

Later in the evening I was giving Rohan a couple of crackers to eat before we brushed his teeth and sent him to bed. He came wandering in to the kitchen and asked if he could have some more. I told him I thought he'd eaten quite a lot, and was he sure he was full?

He pulled up his pyjama top, pointed to his tummy button and said, "I'm only full to here." Then he points higher. "To not be hungry I have to be full up to here!"

A Death in the Family

2006-01-30T13:33:00.000+11:00

So, on Saturday evening we get a phone call from Mark in Melbourne with word that Uncle Frank has passed away. Sad, yes, but not a shock. Frank was very old and his health was failing, so although it happened sooner than expected...

Anyway, on Sunday while we were over at the shops at Woden, Anita pops in to the newsagent to buy a sympathy card. When she comes out, Rohan is wondering what she has been doing, since she doesn't usually go into that shop. Here is the exchange which followed, more or less verbatim.

Rohan: So what were you doing in there, Mum?

Anita: I was buying a sympathy card. Because Uncle Frank died, remember?

Rohan: So where do you think his skeleton is now? In the graveyard already? That could not be possible!

Anita, looking confused and struggling for composure: Well... no. He hasn't been buried yet. There hasn't been a funeral yet. That's why I'm sending the card.

Rohan: Well, how can he read it if he's dead?

[At this point yours truly collapsed helplessly over the shopping trolley, was thumped on the head by my dear wife, and lost track of whatever might have been said next.]

Updating the Family - Part II

2006-01-29T01:55:00.000+11:00

...and here is the follow-up I sent around to bring everyone in the family up-to-date. This one went out to the family, the extended family (my side), and The Group (which is kind of an extended family in its own way, IMO). Note that this is the first time I acknowledged the existence of this Blog to anyone but the immediate family. Odd, but there it is.

Hi All!

Mom, thanks for the newsy email. Glad the car saga had a happy ending, and we're keeping our fingers crossed about the headaches. Hmm. You're starting to make me wonder if I need to give up Coke Zero. Nooooooooooo! ;-)

Everyone else: I've appended the email I wrote to Mom & Dad last week updating them on how things have been going for us. I did this 'cause I'm lazy, and don't particularly want to re-type it all. So you can skip down and read it now if you'd like, because after this paragraph I'll just be giving the follow-up to everything I wrote about there.

And it is good news, mostly.

Anita's Mum seems to be recovering well. She did end up with a colostomy, as they had to do much more repair work than they had hoped, but the prognosis is generally positive. Probably caused by advanced Crohn's disease rather than anything else, but they've sent everything for lab analysis just in case. Anita still plans to go down when she goes home to help out with nursing, but no firm date on that yet. Several weeks at least. I'm lobbying for the family to chip in for half-time professional home nursing, as I can't imagine how Anita, Jackie and Marina will be able to cope with the burden round-the-clock. Not with the kids and everything else.

Rohan seems to have (finally!) started to bounce back. He's still run down and tires easily, but he's almost stopped the cough, the sudden high fevers haven't recurred, his tummy isn't bothering him very much (the anti-biotic is probably going to give him some problems there anyway until he finishes the course) and, most encouraging of all, he's eating like a horse. He went back for a check-up and the ear infection hadn't completely cleared, so she put him on another week of the anti-biotics. Fingers crossed were on the other side of this one!

Oh, and he's *still* at the 90th percentile for height! OK, so he's the mailman's kid. As long as that basketball scholarship pays for college...

;-)

Anita won't hear about the job until next week sometime. She's hopeful, but wary. She says the interview threw her because the people who interviewed her were just awful at conducting one. Poorly thought-out questions, mostly. So she has no idea how they perceived her because she doesn't think the things they asked would have given them a good picture of her (or anyone's) suitability for the role. We'll just have to wait and see.

This weekend our friends Glenn and Linda are staying with us. Glenn quit the ATO to take a job with the Bank of South Australia, which will allow him to stop commuting to Canberra from Adelaide for three days a week. His last week at the ATO was today, so Linda flew in with little Ayla so they could say "goodbye" to everyone here. Glenn and I may meet up at a conference in Sydney in March that we both want to go to. Otherwise we'll probably have to trek out to Adelaide to see them next.

My work at IP Australia is going fine. Easy to do, and short hours, but not very satisfying as the managers there are so weak that it is almost impossible to get them headed in the right direction. Total amateur hour. Frustrating, but I can put up with a little frustration for 40 hour weeks.

Outside of work, not much happening. The house is one maintenance task after another. We need more money coming in if we're ever going to get ahead of it all. Right now we're just trying to keep it from deteriorating too much until that happens. I spent part of this weekend trying to fix a toilet, and another part up on a ladder cleaning out gutters. Whee!

Over a week ago Anita convinced me that we HAD TO install air conditioning (this summer has been unusually humid, which has made the heat much less bearable) but when we went to check it out, we found out the installers were all booked-out until late-February. That's about the time the weather turns beautiful (normally) so we kind of threw up our hands. We may still get one room done, in case the heat lasts longer than expected, then defer the rest until next Spring.

I've been spending my 'down time' exploring a virtual on-line community (it isn't really a game) called SecondLife. I got Eric to organise a 'tour' of the place led by his friend Ted Chiang, a long-time resident. Some of the gang, including B and Terry, are going to join us while we wander around, probably next Saturday (my time). Should be fun!

Glenn and I are, once again, making noises at one another about putting our heads together on an IT book. Glenn has found us a third 'kindred soul' at the ATO, an academic who keeps saying many of the same things I do, and who is also going to that conference in Sydney I'm trying to attend. If the fates decree, we'll all end up there and a real project may be born. The guy is an academic who consults, so he probably has the time, knowledge and inclination to fight through a book writing project, which Glenn and I might not do on our own. As with everything in my life these days, just have to wait and see.

And that's what's happening for us. Sorry we've been so bad at staying in contact over the holidays, but it has just been chaos and worry for us for a couple of months now (as you can read in the email below) and things slipped. We'll get better as things slow down.

Oh, almost forgot. If you've been wondering why you haven't seen any of these long broadcasts in ages, it's partly because I've been experimenting with blogging instead of emails. Oddly, I've been shy about announcing the silly thing, so I've spend nine months writing a blog than nobody else knew existed. Which kind of misses the point, don't you think? Anyway, those of you who are so inclined can catch up on lots of irrelevant rants and ravings here: http://rodmac.blogspot.com/

Anyway, I hope this finds you all well!

Love,
Christopher

Nation Building European Style

2006-01-24T01:57:00.000+11:00

A recent Washington Post Op Ed piece by Sebastian Mallaby entitled Rice's Blind Spot prompted me to write a reply. Not in anger, mind you. Mallaby is an analyst, rather than just another pimp for his own opinions, and I value his pieces because they help me to think calmly about an issue, even when the viewpoint he presents runs counter to my own prejudices.

Instead, I wrote back because the article the notorious Francis Fukuyama of The End of History fame, and the position he ascribes to Fukuyama seemed to ignore a counter example so blindingly obvious (to me) that I couldn't quite grasp how both Fukuyama and Mallaby could fail to address it. So I thought I'd write and ask.

In the end, the email became more of a 'position paper' than a true question, but rather than rattle on any more about what I wrote, I'll just include it and let you take it from there.

Mr. Mallaby,

In re: your Monday column entitled “Rice's Blind Spot”, I wanted to comment on the position you attribute to Francis Fukuyama. Specifically:

The United States lacks the instruments to transform other societies, Fukuyama argues; to build nations you must first build institutions, and nobody knows how to do that.

…and…

Creating a functional Iraq or Afghanistan requires creating norms of work and trust and honesty, and such norms can't be conjured by outsiders, no matter how well organized they are.

Well, if that is Fukuyama’s opinion, I would say it is open to debate. The obvious counterpoint here is the European Union and its demonstrated ability to transform (most) post-Soviet Eastern European countries from poor, authoritarian backwaters into functional, stable, Western-oriented democracies with very bright prospects for the future. Now, someone might observe “But the European Union didn’t directly transform those countries! It just offered a huge incentive (membership) and lots of assistance and they transformed themselves!” To which I—and the Europeans, I’m sure—would reply, “Exactly so.”

I would argue that (your summary of) Fukuyama’s thesis on nation building should be modified as follows: “… and such norms can’t be imposed by outsiders, no matter how well organised they are.” However, we do have a clearly successful model for how to induce societies to transform themselves. Offer them an incentive so powerful that the popular desire for it will essentially force the political culture to bend in that direction. Regimes that fail to make the necessary strides toward the goal, and threaten the attainment of the final outcome, are voted out in favour of those who will.

Here is where, ironically, we see European pragmatism achieving results that American idealism never could. Rice is currently aligned with Bush and the neo-cons in believing that some almost supernatural and innate ‘desire for freedom’ rests in the breast of every human, and that therefore simple enlightened self-interest will cause them to spontaneously embrace the U.S. and it’s declared ideals.

The Europeans are the ‘realists’ here, acknowledging that societies need powerful incentives to overthrow the political and social habits ingrained by years of authoritarian rule. They offered the Eastern Europeans something the U.S., at present, would never dream of offering to another country: a shared future. There is an enormous psychological difference between how the U.S. approach (“Of course you want to be like us, don’t you?”) is perceived and how the European approach (“Well, do you want to be one of us?”) is perceived. Granted, the Europeans only have adopted that approach with respect to other Europeans, but that does not invalidate the model.

Colin Powell famously tried to warn Bush off of the Iraq invasion by telling him “Your going to own this place!” Bush obviously didn’t take that to heart. Perhaps we should make that warning a literal part of whatever “Powell doctrine” emerges in the wake of Iraq. Something along the lines of “America will not overthrow a regime without subsequently offering the country in question the opportunity to progress to full U.S. statehood.”

That would certainly give the neo-cons pause. In fact, it would stop them dead, as they would have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting religious conservatives to go along with any war that was likely to result in a lot of poor, dark-skinned, non English-speaking foreigners becoming U.S. citizens in the not-too-distant future. Just thinking about the reaction within the Republican party makes me grin uncontrollably.

I haven’t read Fukuyama, so I don’t know if he ignores or discounts the European experience as a model for social and political transformation. To do either would be almost unbelievably chauvinistic. Well, entirely believable of the neo-cons, but it would surprise me to see anyone with Fukuyama’s credentials take such a viewpoint. I’d be interested to hear how you think Fukuyama would respond.

Regards,
Christopher Rodrigues Macias
Canberra, Australia

Updating the Family - Part I

2006-01-23T01:51:00.000+11:00

So, here is the text of the email I sent to Mom & Dad today, catching them up on what had been happening with us. We'd tried to call them twice in the last week, in part to wish Mom happy birthday, but our timing was off and we just missed them both times. Anyway...

Mom and Dad,

Apologies for not calling you back! We have had a very long weekend, I'm afraid. The good news is that Anita has a job interview on Monday at the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, the place she worked when we met 10 years ago. They're trying to fill her old position and having trouble finding someone. Anita is hoping they're having *so* much trouble that they'll consider hiring her in some sort of flexible arrangement such as part time or job-sharing. No guarantees that they will, but she has her fingers crossed.

The bad news comes in all shapes and sizes. Of course, Anita has been frazzled all week trying to get her resume and stuff prepared to hand to them last Friday, then trying to find time on the weekend to prep for the interview tomorrow. That wouldn't be so bad but...

Anita's Mum goes in for major abdominal surgery tomorrow (Monday) night. The surgery is expected to take between three and six hours. She'll be in the hospital a couple of weeks, then in rehab for a while. She might or might not end up with a colostomy bag, which has her really upset. Dave has extended his leave, and Mark has flown back from Singapore in order to help her out. Anita is holding-off for now, figuring she'll be needed more once Mum is home. It's nerve-wracking, for everyone.

Meanwhile, Rohan has been back to the doctor again, and has us both a bit worried. The cough wasn't going away, he hasn't been eating well for ages and looks like a stick, and then he suddenly started throwing these high fevers on-and-off, seemingly at random. The doc in Melbourne passed off the cough as a virus and possibly allergies, but the appearance of the fevers made us get him back in to see someone last Friday.

The doctor here can't tie the symptoms together, but noted he appeared to have an ear infection (no pain, but redness) and agreed with us that it was time to track things down. She put him on antibiotics, figuring that will take care of the ear and maybe the fever with it, and sent him for a chest x-ray. We'll take him back on Wednesday (assuming no emergencies) and see what that tells us. If he isn't getting past it, she'll send him for a blood workup and other tests.

We've kept him at home for several days now. Today (Sunday) he seems like he might be responding. The cough was much less, and the fever *might* be getting less and less frequent. We'll wait and see.

I *hate* it when he's sick and we don't know what it is. Worries me to death. In all likelihood this will pass, too. But until it does, I'm going to be all wound up.

Anita isn't as tied in knots about it as I am--perhaps because I'm worrying enough for both of us. I've noticed that when one of us is really strung-out about something, the other is usually pretty calm. I think it's some kind of spousal balance thing: seeing your partner worrying about something kind of 'gives you permission' not to worry as much as they are. You can be 'the rock' for that episode. Funny, if true.

I was at a training course in Sydney for two days last week, coming back Thursday night. Of course, somehow I got sick as a dog on Friday and ended up staying home from work, so we've been a pretty miserable bunch for most of the weekend. All of us were better today, which is why I'm feeling chipper enough to write a long therapeutic email. ;-)

And all of this is a very long-winded explanation about why we weren't able to get back to you on Saturday! We'll try calling next weekend. We really wish we'd been there to join the celebration. No, really. We'd much, much rather have been at a birthday party then sitting around in the heat feeling sorry for ourselves! ;-)

And don't worry. It'll all work out. I just needed to 'vent' on virtual paper, so to speak. Love you both!

- Christopher

Surviving the Holidays

2006-01-17T02:25:00.000+11:00

Well, we’re back from our annual pilgrimage to Melbourne. We… “survived” it I guess would be the way to put it. We had fun, but it’s a long trip, the weather was all over the place, and staying at Mum’s house over Christmas is a bit like pitching a tent in Grand Central Station. Entertaining, but a bit nerve wracking.

Small boy had a great time. He’s now best mates with his cousin Jake, which is great to see as they used to not get on at all before. Now they’ve discovered their mutual interest in the classic Thunderbirds TV show and in all things boy (vehicles, explosions, mayhem, etc.) and the two of them can happily play “blow up the house with our space ship” for hours without actually blowing up either the house or each other.

Ella, Jake’s little sister, is less enthused about the new dynamic duo. For example, there was the foam rocket incident. Anita’s Mum had given Rohan one of those foam rocket launcher thingys for Christmas—the kind where you stamp your foot on a plastic bladder to shoot a nerf rocket off a little launch pad. Later that day I turned around to see Rohan carefully aiming it at Ella from a distance of about six inches, while his co-conspirator Jake tried to push the squirming Ella into position to be shot. Before I could intervene, Jake gave a horrendous howl. Ella had decided she’d had enough, and bitten him on the hand. Confusion reigned as the assembled adults tried to scold everybody in sight, and only the fact that I’d seen what happened got poor Ella a reprieve (and Rohan and Jake in the doghouse).

That was about the worst of it, though, and most of the time Anita and I were revelling in finally being able to leave Rohan alone playing with his cousins without having to be on top of them every second. We’d be happier if they were playing at being helpful firemen rather than mini Dr. Strangelove’s, but we’ll take what we can get. ;-)

Almost all of the immediate family was in Melbourne this year, so that was good. Mark and Li-Lin were in from Singapore. They spent a fair bit of time house hunting, as they’re planning on moving to Melbourne towards the end of this year, which is great news. Dave and Deana and their six-month-old little boy Daragh were there from Ireland, and of course Daragh (who is cute as a button) had “rock star” status as the new baby in the family.

Jackie and Jonathan are moving around as well, but that’s because their house is undergoing a major renovation and extension. They were staying at Mum’s for several months before Christmas, then moved to Jonathan’s parents’ place to make room for the visitors over the holidays. We gathered at their house after New Years to see the nearly-finished work, and it has transformed the place from a too-small older house with a dumpy looking back extension dating to the 70’s into a spacious, modern home. We’re both very happy for them and green with envy. The only worry is that Jonathan’s company was bought out by a much bigger outfit just before Christmas, so now, just as their finishing the extension, he’s waiting to hear how secure his job is. Sometimes I think the writers of Neighbours could save themselves a lot of trouble and just interview them once a month to mine story ideas.

We also made the annual pilgrimage down to Mornington (one of the seaside towns that stretch south from Melbourne along the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay) to visit Anita’s old teaching mate Val and her husband John, plus a few other friends.

(Since I’m sure you’re mildly curious, the map attached to this post shows where we were. The crosshair is on Mornington, and I’ve added a purple ‘x’ (just East of then ‘n’ in ‘Hampton’) showing about where Mum’s house is. The drive is about 45 minutes. Oh, and get a load of the names, will you? No, they aren’t misprints. There really are towns in Victoria called “Tarwin Lower”, “Poowong East” and—my personal favourite—“Nar Nar Goon”!)

Val and John had recently finished a renovation to their Mornington house (their main house is actually in Kew, about where the ‘R’ in ‘Melbourne’ is on the map) and it is now quite possibly the cosiest, most inviting place I’ve ever seen. Looks like just an old white beach bungalow from the outside, but inside its all polished wood floors with lovely oriental rugs, 12’ ceilings, eclectic furniture covered with cushions and throws, and even more eclectic artwork (mostly by friends) on walls and between furniture, and books, books, books, everywhere. The place is full of spaces where you just want to curl up with a cup of tea for an hour or two. When we finally save up the money to renovate, I think we’ll both be tempted to drive an interior designer down to Mornington and just point. “We’ll have one of those, please.”

The only downside was that the day was stinking hot, so instead of relaxing and eating in the back garden as usual, we were forced inside. We’d brought Rohan’s swimmers with us, and when he got bored with adult company I walked him the half-block down to the beach. The bay is colder than what most people would consider comfortable for swimming at this time of year… or it would be under normal circumstances. New Years Eve Melbourne set an all-time record high for a day in December at almost 43C (109F) and damn near everyone was in the water taking refuge from the heat.

The funny thing to me is just how much the temperature in Oz is regulated by sunshine. While we were at the beach, a bank of clouds rolled in and greyed things over. Instantly things went from unbearable to quite pleasant. A half-hour later they were gone and it was like the inside of an oven again.

At the end of the week we traded babysitting nights with Dave and Deanna so that each couple had a child-free night out. It was something of a hilarious reality check for all of us. Dave and Deana got to deal with a rambunctious four-year-old for a night. I imagine they were telling themselves something like “well, our lovely little Daragh will be *much* easier to handle at that age, I’m sure…”. We, on the other hand, were chuckling and thinking “Sorry, guys, but you’re raising a boy too!”

We spent the evening at a trendy restaurant downtown picked-out by Jenny and Steven, our old friends and authoritative guides to fine dining in Melbourne. As usual, the food was great and the company better. I wish we could go out to dinner with them once a fortnight rather than twice a year or so. Well, not just yet. My current downsized salary wouldn’t hack it. Ah, well. Someday.

Then it was our turn to babysit, and Anita and I quite happily took over sweet little Daragh for the evening, thinking to ourselves “Hey, been there, done that. We can take care of a six month-old standing on our heads!” Well… the *plan* was that Anita would lull Smallest Boy to sleep, then we’d plonk him in his crib, congratulate ourselves on a job well done, and relax in front of the Lifestyle channel for the evening. The reality was somewhat different. Oh, Daragh went to sleep just fine, once we put him into the baby sling (strapped to a cooing Auntie Anita) and she walked him around for a while. The problem was that he wouldn’t *stay* asleep unless she *kept* walking around with him. As soon as she tried to so much as sit down he’d wriggle awake and start fussing. Anita ended up spending the whole evening (several hours) trying to stay on her feet with a sleeping baby strapped across her tum.

When the parents returned, we handed him back with relief. Not to mention renewed sympathy for Dave and Deana, after our little one night flashback to our own days with Rohan at that age. Wow, you forget so quickly! And, on the upside, I didn’t have to worry about Anita getting all mopey and wistful about not being able to have another ourselves. ;-)

The other big “welcome home” was for Anita’s cousin Helen (a.k.a. ‘BT’) and Nick and their two little girls, who were finally moving back to Melbourne after Nick finished a two year stint in Oslo, Norway. We’ve always enjoyed spending time with them, but we’d only seen them once in the last couple of years. Well, twice, really. First at Dave and Deana’s wedding in Ireland about 18 months ago, then shortly afterwards when we stopped in Oslo to visit for a few days as part of our ‘grand tour’ that we scheduled around the wedding. It was funny hearing them tell stories about Norway, as it reminded us of our time in Denmark. They seemed to have the same reaction to the adventure, too. A great experience—one you wouldn’t trade for the world—but hard at times, and very different. It feels like one more thing we have in common with them. I think it’s going to be very cool to have someone else in the family that we can swap stories of living in Scandinavia with.

The dark cloud hovering over the gathering of the clan was Mum's ongoing illness. She's had a serious intestinal problem for a while now--one that even the specialists have been unable to diagnose--and the pain and restricted diet have been wearing on her. Just this week we learned that she was going to have to have an operation as soon as possible, so now everyone is trying to work out what to do.

Poor Dave is trying to postpone his trip back to Ireland so he can help, but Daragh is sick with a cold or something and Deana probably can't delay her return long. The idea of Deana having to fly back without Dave, but with a sick and fussy Daragh, is not something they particularly want to do, so Dave is kind of between a rock and a hard place. Anita wants to help out as well, but it will be complicated for us as well if she has to run down there on short notice. Right now we're just taking it one day at a time and waiting to see what happens.

I spent the week before Christmas and the week after New Years commuting in to the Unisys offices in Melbourne so I could complete a huge backlog of self-paced computer-based training that Unisys dictated everyone in my role had to complete by the end of the year. Commuting in to St. Kilda from Keysborough was… painful. It was kind of fun to take the train and the trams, and I actually enjoyed figuring out a route through Melbourne’s rather arcane and visitor-unfriendly mass transit system, but the length of the trip (about 1:15 each way) was hard to take. It has been ages since I’ve had to endure a commute that long. By the second day I was complaining to Anita that, in the time it took her to drive me to the train station here, I would already have been at work (walking!) in Canberra.

This didn’t score me any points with her, of course. Anita still sees the advantages of living near all her family and old mates, and has what I see as a rather thick pair of rose-coloured glasses on when she looks at Melbourne. Hell, everybody from Melbourne I’ve ever met are dead certain that it is the only place they could ever stand to live, so I guess I should be grateful that my wife has only a mild case of the disease. ;-)

I can see why the natives love it. It is very ‘comfortable’ in a lot of ways, and has a lot of things that you would become very attached to if you grew up there. The restaurants, AFL matches, strolling up Swanston St. for a day of power shopping, the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, strolling down the Esplanade in St. Kilda (and popping over to Ackland St. for a bite), the eclectic pubs and eateries in Fitzroy, etc. etc. That said, I’m now powerfully addicted to the comforts and conveniences of Canberra, and, unlike native Melbournians and Sydneysiders, I haven’t been raised from birth to regard the national capital as an isolated wasteland akin to Siberia. Melbourne is great as big cities go… but it’s still a big sprawling city. After a week there I’m always relieved to be back home.

Speaking of which… The trip back was long, hot and slow. Yet, as good as it was to see everyone in Melbourne again, all three of us were relieved to be back. The relief lasted only until the heat wave settled over us, of course, as we are into our fourth summer without central air conditioning. Now, in the States, very few people who aren’t on welfare get by without air conditioning of some kind, but here it is not that uncommon. Many of my mates either don’t have it, or only have evaporative cooling in one room, or have only had ducted air conditioning installed in the last couple of years. Most newer homes have it, but the ex-govie housing that makes up the older suburbs was built without central air *or* central heating.

Yes, in case you’re wondering, many Canberrans survive the winters with only a wood burning stove in the living area for heat. This in a town where the idiot planners allowed them to use the same specs for the houses as they have in Sydney, despite the fact that winter nights in Canberra regularly sink to -7C (about 20F). Double-glazed windows are actually considered ‘exotic’ here, in spite of how much people spend on heating and cooling. And our house, which was extended and renovated only in ’93, had almost no insulation whatsoever in the roof. Sometimes Aussies drive me nuts.

Anyway, by the second day or so of suffocating heat, Anita was threatening dire consequences if we didn’t get out and start shopping for some form or air conditioning. Given our current financial profile I’m not certain how we’ll manage this, but after being kept up all night—twice—because it was too hot to sleep, I’ve given in. If the worst happens, at least debtors prison is likely to be heated and air conditioned.

Ironically, yesterday the weather did another about-face, and today it was in the mid-20s and overcast. This evening we had pouring rain, to the point that the storm drains on our street were clogging-up with accumulated junk and turning the road into a river. Fabulous. Now I’ll have to mow our weeds next weekend. Sigh.

Well, I’m off to finish packing for a trip to Sydney tomorrow. Another training session for Unisys, but this time in an actual classroom. Rob Mitchell, who used to work with me at IPA, will be there as well, so I’ll have somebody to hang with. I sent Rob an email telling him I’d check at the front desk when I got to the hotel to see if he was in, and asking if he wasn’t there, did he want me to go straight to the bar and order two beers. His answer: “Yes, by all means order two beers. I’ll have a couple myself when I arrive.” Classic Rob. I’m looking forward to the trip now. ;-)

- Christopher

Ugly Day

2005-12-02T23:55:00.000+11:00

Bizarre, ugly day in every way today. The young Van Ngyuen kid was hanged in Singapore. John Howard smiles his way through the opening of the Prime Minister's XI match at Manuka Oval as though nothing had happened. The Howard government gets its damned IR reforms passed by the Senate. And then, to punctuate the day, at five o'clock a vicious storm front passes through Canberra, spawning several "mini-tornados", uprooting hundreds of trees, and killing a man in Curtin.

I was headed to the Unisys offices for the monthly staff meeting as the storm was abating, but the aftermath meant I was a half-hour late. Missed the meeting (a short one) and only Rob Mitchell was there. Mike O'Regan apparently was still circling over Canberra on his flight back from Melbourne, waiting for the airport to be re-opened. I chatted with Rob for a bit, then headed home, listening as I had on the ride up to the ABC as calls pourned in with details of trees downed, streets blocked and power lost. The one amusing bit was when the announcer crossed over to the cricket, and the crew who was supposed to be calling the match related how the storm had quickly put an end to the affair and sent the entire crowd scrambling madly for their cars. I'm hoping that's a omen for Johnny.

Unwanted Opportunity

2005-12-01T23:07:00.000+11:00

I ran out to Unisys at lunch today to meet with a guy named Allen Koehn, the new manager for the government sector for Unisys Asia/Pacific. He's a Yank, and actually worked under Greg Baroni, the partner who pulled me into the consulting side of KPMG back in 1988. Greg runs the GOIS practice for Unisys corporate, where he apparently pulled a bunch of people in from Bearing Point, the name KPMG stuck to its consulting arm when it spun it off a few years back. I exchanged emails with him after I found out I was, in a sense, working for him again. So now I'm considered "connected" to one of the bigwigs in Unisys.

The folks back in D.C. look at me like I'm hallucinating or exaggerating when I try to explain the one-degree-of-separation thing that keeps happening in Canberra. Well, here you go, folks. It's now extending to take in people from overseas that I haven't seen in fifteen years. Go figure.

Anyway, Ron King, the head of QCOM, phoned a few days ago to tell me he'd talked with Allen and found out he (Allen) was looking to bring on a senior architect or two to help run major (multi-million-dollar) bids. Ron suggested he talk to me and a new QCOM architect in Sydney before hiring anyone new. I was flattered, but I'm cozy enough in my role at IP Australia that the prospect of a high-profile role like that makes me damned nervous. But, not being an idiot, I leapt at the chance to meet Allen and try to make an impression.

The meeting went very well, although it was brief. Allen was all but declaring me "hired" half way through, saying things like "well, we'll have to look at ways to get you out of there" (meaning IPA). I kept up the 'enthusiastic' act, but told him straight out that I was not interested in a QA type of role, where I was expected to show up late in the game and give my blessing to an unsightly pile of bid paperwork and random architectural drawings and costings. To my surprise, he agreed, going so far as to say that he preferred a model where the architect on the bid moved in to the delivery team if the bid was won. Makes perfect sense, as it keeps the key knowledge, experience and intent from the bid team as part of the delivery team.

But... proposal work!

Anyway, when I got back to IPA I gave Dan Collins a heads-up on the situation, primarily to let him know that it wasn't my idea, and if they did come to him to ask to pull me out he was welcome to tell them where to go. I also need to get onto Mike O'Regan. Not sure how he'll react. Actually, I'm not sure if anything will happen at all, but I'm covering my bases.

It's nice to be wanted, but I'm way past the point where money or flattery can persuade me to take on a role that threatens my lifestyle. Allen is the stereotypical American consulting manager. He's going to be used to ambitious Type A personalities that will kill themselves to get that next promotion. He'll adjust, I assume, but it's going to take a while, and in the meantime I don't want to have to be one of the poor bunnies that he decides are "lazy" or "incompetent" just because we're not willing to sell our souls to Unisys in pursuit of the almighty dollar. There's a reason I don't live in the U.S. anymore. Well, actually, there's a multitude of reasons. But your stereotypical clean-cut, golf-playing, status seeking Type A American management types are waaaay up there on that list.

Programmer Wannabe

2005-11-29T03:36:00.000+11:00

For me, as for most people I imagine, it is a rare and wonderful thing when your job actually requires you to do something you really enjoy. Oh, there are often tasks I take on that are "challenging" and even "interesting", but seldom are they just good fun.

As a software 'architect', and an 'enterprise architect' at that, I will seldom if ever be asked to actually write code again as part of my day job. At the moment, however, Dan Collins has asked me to develop a very simple application in Java to demonstrate how we could recieve a 'zipped' file of documents and meta data from an external party, extract the relevant info, and feed it to the new SAP front-end processing application. "Excellent!" I thought, "A chance to get my hands dirty again!"

It's been a bit of a struggle to get my act (and development environment) together to tackle this seemingly trivial bit of coding. I've been away too long, and my Java coding skills (never that strong, truth be told, as I have only rarely been asked to code in anger) have atrophied alarmingly. But now... Well, I've got my fancy new NetBeans 5.0 Beta 2 IDE up and running reasonably well. I've started flexing my 'basic Java' coding muscles again, and discovering that I still grok it, even if my reflexes are slow and knowledge of the APIs appallingly poor.

And tonight I went New School, installing a graphical Subversion SCM client, creating an on-line hosted project on JavaForge, and putting my crappy little source code files under version control. I frankly wasn't sure I'd be able to do it, but it went relatively quickly, and now I have that pleasant "well, I'm not so old I can't still learn new tricks" feeling (almost a sense of relief, actually).

I still feel like I'm doing a high-wire act trying to code this all up myself, but at least I have half of a net underneath me now. I can rework the code at will, without worrying that I'll foolishly discard part of it that I'll later wish I'd kept. Subversion will keep all those old experiments around for me to go back and mine if/when I ever need to.

I say "half a net" because I still need to convert from my blunt-edged hack/test/debug/repeat approach and start doing things the "test-driven" way. I think I may get stuck into TestNG tomorrow night. If that comes up as quickly as JavaForge and Subversion have I may be in trouble. It will be hard to resist staying up coding half the night, even after the demo is delivered. There is a part of me that would dearly love to start on a real development project, maybe learning/leveraging the Spring framework, and THAT could end up being an even bigger time sink than my recent Fractal Mapper fantasy map (re-)creation venture.

Oh, and the owner/lead of FM just sent me back a personal bug fix update to that program tonight as well! The 'disappearing forests' problem is fixed. I'm still probably 10+ hours of experimentation and painstaking re-drawing work to finish the damned thing off, but it looks good, and I know I will eventually finish it. Touch wood.

The Gods seem to be smiling on me a bit this week. Either that, or they've decided to make me a test subject in their latest sleep deprivation experiments...

- Christopher

Swimming and Trimming

2005-11-05T23:03:00.000+11:00

Today was R's first day back at swimming lessons in five weeks. After the once-a-day special sessions during the first week of school holidays, he was off for a week, then we were in the U.S., then last weekend Jenny and Stevie were here and we just plain forgot.

This morning he was in one of his moods and pitched a fit for almost an hour. Anita was dealing with it and somehow managed to coax him into getting ready to go at the right time. As soon as I bundled him out the door he calmed down, and then I just had to keep him distracted until we got to Aqua Harmony.

He was very anxious to go, even while he was having his tantrum. But when we were walking across the gravel of the car park he said quietly, "I wish I didn't have to go to swimming today. I'm very tired." Uh-oh, I thought. The tantrum wore him out, and now he's going to try to back out of the lesson! Yikes!

False alarm. When I told him how jealous I was that he got to have a nice, relaxing swim, he agreed that it was. After walking in the door, Sue spotted us right away and gave Rohan a big smile and wave. "Well! Welcome back, Rohan! Are you glad to be back at swimming?" He gave her a shy smile and a quiet "Yes" and I relaxed.

A few minutes later, though, Sue wandered by and asked me, "You knew this was water safety day, didn't you."

I looked blank for a few seconds.

"Uh, no. Why?"

"Well, we usually have them stay in shorts and t-shirts today. Can you maybe have him just leave his shirt on?"

"Oh. Uh... sure. No problem." Then a thought hit me. "Do you need me to get into the pool with him?"

"Oh, no."

Huge sigh of relief. Actually, I'd worn my swimmers under my jeans just in case the time away caused him to balk at getting back in, and I needed to get in with him. In the end, though, when 10:45 rolled around I just led him over to the end of the pool where the small (in two ways) class was assembling, waited a moment until one of the instructors (Katrina I think her name is) recognised him and started bantering with him, then helped him slip into the water and retreated back to my white plastic chair to relax.

It turned out to be a pleasant half-hour. There's this big bloke with a goatee like mine and his hair pulled back in a pony tail who the instructors always ask to stand on the end of the mat on the side of the pool whenever they're having the kids run down the mat and jump in. He was sitting next to me today and we struck up an on-and-off conversation during the session. Nice guy. I bought a diet coke from the Sue and complained about not having had any caffeine yet that day. He said that they'd probably be off to take care of that after the lesson.

"Oh, do you usually go someplace special afterwards?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "wherever the wife wants to go. Probably Manuka. She'll be wanting 'coffee, coffee!'" he said smiling.

"Man, that's familiar," I said. "It sounds like we're married to the same woman!"

Rohan was all smiles for the whole lesson. He can still really surprise me. When we finally got him into the water at Aqua Harmony for the first time, and he came home raving about what a good time he had, I was convinced it was all bravado. He was proud of having done the class, but would be terrified about having to do it again in a week. But, to my constant relief and amazement, he keeps proving me wrong. He really does love swimming lessons. Doesn't like getting his head wet much, but at the end he doesn't want to come out. Good on 'im!

I didn't have a spare shirt to replace the one that had gone into the pool on him, so after we'd put his pants and shoes back on I just plopped his poncho-style pool towel back on him to keep the sun off, bought him his by now traditional post-lesson bag of chips ("The green ones, Dad. They're the new chicken flavour. I would like those.") and walked him back across the car park for the trip home.

Back at the house, however, it was time for Dad to get dirty...

With all the rain they'd had while we were away, the weeds that constitute 90 per cent of our garden vegetation had run riot. Although we'd had the lawn done just before we left, by the time we got back the back and side gardens were two-feet deep in most places, and in some spots the top of the 'jungle canopy' was touching a full meter. Not wanting to pay what it would cost to have all that cleared away by Jim's Mowing, we decided I'd have a go with our overpowered Ryobi electric whipper-snipper (which in Yank translates to "weed eater"--funny how both countries have nick-named the thing after the first major brand to advertise the device on local television).

I changed into shorts--the day was really warming up--and grabbed a cap, filter mask, safety goggles, garden gloves, an enormously long extension cord I'd bought for just such a contingency, and the whipper-snipper. Then it was out to the back to try and reclaim dominion over the garden before it became infested with leopards and pythons.

My arms... are killing me!

It was slow going. The stuff was so thick that I had to sweep the head of the Ryobi like a scythe so that I could sweep aside the masses of weed as they were cut down by the whirring nylon line. In ten minutes my front half from the waist down was a slimy green, speckled with billions of bits of disintegrated weeds and other things too horrible to mention.

The frustrating bit, though, was that the damned line feed mechanism wasn't working properly. I'd get a couple square meters of space cleared, and the line would break short and refuse to play out when I bumped the head on the ground.

Last weekend Jenny had tried to help me rethread the spool with the new line I'd bought, and we'd discovered that the thing had the wrong spool in it(!). Oh, it fit, but it wasn't the proper one for the model I had. Mine is supposed to have a dual-spindle with a piece of line from each coming out on either side of the head. The spool I had was for a model that only used a single piece of line for cutting. I wasn't going to have time to get that fixed, though, especially this long after I'd bought the thing, so I had decided to just try to make the best of it with the piece I had. At least for now.

Jenny had tried to show me how to thread it to avoid line feed problems, but obviously I hadn't followed her advice correctly. I'd cut for five minutes, then spend anywhere from one to six minutes pulling the feed head off and fixing the line. Finally the three-meter length I'd started with was played out, and I had to re-thread it. This time I guess I did it correctly, because I only had to re-set the thing twice more over the course of the second hour of cutting.

There is a certain weird feeling of satisfaction that most men get from attacking a hard job with a good power tool. I don't get as much of a kick out of it as your fanatical home handyman types, but I still enjoy it. And, like most men, if I start to get bored doing a mindless job I start daydreaming about other things while I'm hacking away. With an almost-fun destructive tool like a whipper-snipper you can play all sorts of silly mind games. I decided to pass the time imagining that I was mowing down evil doers instead of just weeds. I amused myself picturing the thicket of ugly vegetation as an assemblage of those disgusting fundamentalist scumbags who have become the scourge of modern civilisation and whom all of the educated and peace-loving peoples of the world rightly loathe and shun. In no time at all, thousands of Republican voters lay strewn in bloody heaps at my feet. Ah, sweet victory!

Two hours after I started I stopped. The back garden was clear except for the flower beds and the space behind the shed. In any case, I was completely buggered. The Ryobi cuts as well as the guy at the hardware store said it would, even with a single line, but it weighs enough that spending a couple of hours wielding it two-handed was enough to turn my arms into lead weights. At Anita's urging, I decided to postpone the second assault til the morrow.

As I was standing by the back door to the garage, getting ready to put things away, there was this soft 'thump' behind me. I turned around and it took me a minute to spot the cause. About five feet from me a small bird was crouched on the back deck.

It was a small thing, about the size of a wren, which is what convinced me that this must have been the source of the noise. Birds that size just don't land on people's decks and stay there. Ever. Maggies like Khalashades wander up on our deck most evenings, and the previous evening a couple of big Currawongs had perched on our front deck rail and made mournful warblings at the sky for quite a while. The tiny birds, however, keep to the bushes and tree tops. The poor little guy must have accidentally flown into the glass of the sliding glass door from the living room and stunned himself.

I had closer look, then sat down on the deck a few feet away to observe. I wanted to see if he was going to recover. He just sat there, unmoving except for his eyes, which had a distinctive white ring around them. Rohan came out to join me, and Anita went to the study to get my "Birds of the ACT" book so that we could see if we could identify him. It took a bit of page flipping. We kept staring at the various wrens, but none seemed to quite match him. Finally Anita looked a few pages back, and there he was. A "Silvereye". The eye, indeed, is what cinched it, so its a good name.

I was getting worried that he'd hurt himself badly, but at some point he decided he was feeling a little better and flitted up onto the handle of the door to the garage a few feet futher from us. Then he jumped onto the handle of the Ryobi. We decided he was going to be fine, and I started figuring out how I was going to clean myself up.

By the time I'd given up on yard clearing, I looked so disgusting it was funny. My back was essentially clean, but from the front I looked like the Swamp Thing's geeky little brother. I couldn't go through the house like that, so I asked Anita to take a towel out to the granny flat's bathroom. Our back yard is very private, so I stripped down to my skivvies--trying to get as much of the mess off the clothes as I could as I went--and then cut through the back of the garage to go have a looooong hot shower.

The hot water gave out before I was ready to end it, but the 'cold rinse' effect felt wonderful anyway. Invigorating. Now, of course, I'm starting to feel it. It isn't making typing easier, either.

Well, better stop whingeing and go get some shut eye. I have another battle with the green-blooded forces of evil in the morning.

Going Fractal

2005-09-19T21:59:00.000+10:00

For anybody out there who isn't aware already, I'd better let you in on the secret of my dark past. You see, I'm one of them. Yes, them. The Strange Ones. The lurkers in corners. They Who May Not be Noticed at Parties.

Yes, I am... a Geek. A Nerd. A Dork. A Nebbish.

And I'm proud of it, dammit!

Now, with that little bit of catharsis out of the way...

So, as many geeks of a certain age do, I cling to my primitive geek roots by getting together with others of my vintage on a regular basis to relive the (few) joys of our mercifully-long-ago youth. In my case, this involves a group of ten aging Dungeons & Dragons aficionados who gather in Phil's refurbished shed (that's an Aussie term that roughly translates as 'garage', but not exactly) once a fortnight to eat junk food, roll oddly shaped dice around, and make rude jokes at one anothers' expense. Hey, everybody needs a hobby.

Anyway, as we've wended our way through Craig Smith's current campaign, my thoughts strayed to perhaps running again myself sometime not-so-soon. I'd found a campaign world I wanted to use, and (I thought to myself) if I got started now, I might just have something ready to go in, say... seven or eight years. A little advance planning never hurt, I figured.

So, some time ago I'd spent a couple of bucks on a piece of software called Fractal Mapper. It's a neat (and inexpensive) program that roleplaying dweebs like yours truly can use to draw up maps of 'fantastic lands'. I'd only futzed with it once or twice after buying it, but I'd always wanted to really put it through its paces.

Fractal Mapper (henceforth 'FM') allows you to pull in an image file to use as a background for the maps you draw. The obvious use of this is to allow you to scan in an existing map and then 'draw over' it in FM to create a better/different version. That struck me as an ideal way to get stuck-in to the program. I'd be challenged by the effort of trying to recreate (and improve on) the existing map, which would force me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tools. The fact that it was a pre-defined map meant that I would just focus on the tools, not spend endless hours staring blankly at the screen waiting for my non-existent muse to inspire me with what to draw next.

Well, be careful what you wish for...

As luck would have it, one night while surfing some gaming sites I stumbled across a jpeg version of a map of the D&D world I wanted to use. It was a 'bare' version, showing only the terrain of the main continent. Perfect, I thought. I'd always felt the map artwork for Eberron was pretty low grade. Here was a chance to kill several birds with one stone. Creating a detailed map of the continent of Khorvaire ("unsafe at any speed" I always chuckle to myself) would be a real challenge in FM, and in the end I'd have a new, souped-up map with which to launch a new D&D campaign. And so I began.

That was two months ago. Hundreds of hours (literally) later, I am about half-way through what has become an all-consuming passion: the creation of the Ultimate Map of Khorvaire!

Oh, it seemed easy enough at the beginning. The early work of tracing out the continent's coastline was a slow, painstaking effort. With that behind me, though, I started in on the details. Rivers and lakes. Mountains and hills. Forests. Cities, towns and villages. Points of importance. Trade roads. Railroads. (Yes, railroads.) Seas and bays. Marshes and swamps and volcanoes and... All with lovely calligraphic text labels carefully positioned next to them, and all needing to be carefully layered atop one another so that, for instance, the trade road to the city of Passage runs over the trees of the Great Forest, rather than disappearing into them and then magically reappearing on the other side.

The underlying problem, of course, is that I am enjoying almost every minute of it. The only thing I can compare it to would be working on a mesmerizing 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. You start in on it thinking "Ah, how hard can a boring ol' jigsaw puzzle be?" and the next thing you know you're sneaking out to the study twice a night to try and locate just one more key border piece, or the missing bit from the building on the right that you have 80% complete and are just dying to finish off.

It's gotten so bad that I found myself playing with a preview of a professional illustration program I found just to see if I might use it to solve some particularly tricky terrain rendering issues. (Cliffs are going to be the death of me.) Anita is about ready to declare war. The only thing saving me is the amount of time she spends playing mindless games in Puzzle Pirates, which allows me to cast the protective People in Glass Houses spell whenever it comes up in conversation. If she puts up with me all the way to the end (and Gods only know when that will be) I'm going to owe her big time.

How to pay off is what worries me. Somehow I doubt that she'll settle for a poster sized laminated copy of the map. Hmm. Maybe if I offered her the first signed and numbered print...

Lounging with Leonard

2005-09-07T23:25:00.000+10:00

Of late I have been slowly discovering the music of Leonard Cohen. I suppose it was inevitable, really. He seems to be the Kevin Bacon of the music world--a touchstone that everything else connects to in short and surprising ways.

I'd never even heard of him until ten years ago, and even then it was indirectly. The guy who was the Australian agent for the American crew who came out to Canberra in '95 had us over for dinner one night, and during the course of the evening wanted to show off his new $10,000 stereo rig. He played a beautiful--almost haunting--CD of Cohen covers by Jennifer Warnes entitled Famous Blue Raincoat. I noted the title, and as I recall we actually did buy a copy at some point, but if so it appears to have disappeared in the course of our travels.

I didn't follow up on Cohen's music until this past June, when I was on an expedition to the Woden library with Rohan. We made our usual circuit--kids videos to kids books to regular music CDs--and I spotted what amounted to a double-CD greatest hits collection on the shelves. Even then I didn't' really listen to it. I was busy, and just ripped both CDs to iTunes so I could have a listen when the mood struck.

Then one day, listening to my patchy collection of ripped and pirated music off of the Tablet PC at work, the rotation took me to the Cohen collection. I've been listening, on-and-off, more and more intently, ever since.

I think the thing that I find most interesting about him, at this point, is how he is like the hidden Shakespeare of music. Shakespeare is the source of untold book titles, corny bad-pun bookshop names, everyday cliches, and who-knows-whatall. If you have any exposure to literature at all you find yourself wading through a swamp of Shakespearean allusions that are effectively invisible to anyone (is there anyone?) who isn't familiar with his work.

Cohen is obviously not nearly so pervasive or influential as Shakespeare, but it is interesting the degree to which his many devotees are constantly quoting or covering his work in so many unusual places. I think my favourite so far was the rather beautiful cover of "Hallelujah" that graced a scene in Shrek. And 'graced' is the right word. I think it says something about the gravitas of the film that they could incorporate a piece like that and have it actually work.

Anyway, Cohen has now bubbled to the top of my rotation list for what limited music listening time I have. And I've resolved to go (re)acquire that Jennifer Warnes CD at the first opportunity.

Khalashades One O'Birdie

2005-08-20T16:10:00.000+10:00

Last Saturday Rohan and I were out doing a bit of work in the back garden. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not in the way you might think. Rohan was indeed helping with the work, at least most of the time. But calling that weed-choked wasteland a 'garden' is really an abuse of the term.

Anyway...

As we're puttering about on the paved area, a few maggies land up on the 'lawn' and start poking about for food. There's one big, fat, sleek male and two others that might have been either females or juveniles. I encouraged Rohan to run inside and get something to feed them with.

(Maggies show up in our lawn daily, and we've gotten in the habit of feeding 'em bread or birdseed if we're out there ourselves. Some of the bolder ones will get close enough to take it from your hand.)

Rohan comes back shortly with a slice of bread, walks slowly (for him) up onto the lawn, and kneels down and holds it out to the birds. Now, sometime in the last few months the typical four-year-old hyperactive imagination and motor-mouth switches have gone on in his head, so he promptly starts a running narration for me about who the birds are, and why they're there, and what they're thinking, etc. etc. The big one--he informs me, as he feeds it a hunk of bread--is his good friend Khalashades One O'Birdie, over for a visit and a meal.

The name about killed me, especially the way he just made it up, but said it so seriously, like he was narrating a nature documentary. I made sure when I came back in to scribble it down on a scrap of paper on my desk so I could remember it.

Over the last week the maggies have reappeared a couple of times, and often a big male, perhaps the same one, has been along. I started pointing him out to Rohan whenever I saw him. "Hey, look! Khalashades One O'Birdie is back."

Rohan would likely have forgotten the whole name thing if I hadn't started using it... Well, now that I think about it, that aint necessarily so. My son has the most phenomenal long-term memory, especially given that his Dad has a memory like a sieve. Recently he's just casually mentioned things that we discussed over a year ago, when he was only three, and sometimes these were things that we only told him about once and never mentioned again! Weird.

Anyway, all of us have now started referring to this bird by this ridiculously long name, including Anita, who finds it just as funny as I do. Come for a visit sometime and we'll have Rohan introduce you.

P.S. I found the photo I used here on a web page collection of photos of Australian birds. The page creator is another expat (probably Brit, but maybe from continental Europe) now living in Canberra. I'll probably start mining this page often, as the birds are one of the things I love about this city.

Alarums and Excursions

2005-08-14T02:35:00.000+10:00

Today was another long Saturday, including another failed swimming lesson attempt at Aqua Harmony. So tonight, when we jokingly asked Rohan what we should do for dinner and he replied "I want to go to Della Pi Piazza", Anita and I decided that was a good idea. We bundled ourselves into the car and headed off.

Cafe Della Piazza, as it is really called, is one of our favorite haunts in Canberra. It sits in Garema Place, a nice little plaza along the city's pedestrian mall which is the real "heart" of the city in many ways. I've loved the place since I was first introduced to it, the day I met with Tony Kumer to discuss what turned out to be my first stint at the ATO. Sitting in one of the outdoor tables, the sun streaming down, cold beer in hand, a couple of mates from the D&D group stopping to chat as they happened by... Ah, good times. And many is the cozy, intimate dinner Anita and I had there later that same year.

Rohan was probably genetically predisposed to love the place, and so he does, deciding on his first visit (as a one-year-old) that Della Piazza's battered calimari rings were his personal favourite dish. When, two years later, he discovered the little freezer full of gelato stashed back by the kitchen, that just sealed the deal. He still can't say the name properly, but that's probably our fault. We were so charmed/amused by his mispronunciation that most of the time in family conversation the restaurant is referred to as "Della Pee Pee Atza".

Anita and I had our hearts set on a little relaxation and de-stressing when we agreed to splurge on a dinner out. Alas, it was not to be. No sooner had the wait staff taken our order than Anita's mobile starts tootling away in her bag. She pulls it out and very shortly she starts looking very concerned indeed. It's SecurityOne, our security monitoring service. One of the motion sensors in the house, the one it the laundry, has been triggered repeatedly. Did we want them to send somebody around to check?

Even aside from having dinner on the way, it would take us at least 30-35 minutes to bundle R out the door, trek back to the car, and drive back to Chifley to check it out ourselves. So, yes, we'll spend the $40 fee for a patrol visit, thank you.

Well, as you can imagine, there went all sense of calm and relaxation. We decided there was nothing to be done but wait to hear from them, so we got on with dinner. Except, twenty minutes later, there was still no word. Eventually I couldn't take it any more and rang up Security One. The guy was friendly enough, but telling me that they were having a busy night and that it was taking time to get a patrol car around was not going to make me feel any better.

I asked for details on the sensor logs, which did calm me down quite a bit because (a) he had them there and could answer my questions right away, (b) the logs showed that only the sensor in the laundry had been triggered(?!?), and (c) there had been no more readings since the initial flurry that triggered the alarm in the first place. That relieved me greatly. It was hard to make sense of readings only in the laundry room, but that also was not what you would expect from an actual break-in. Unless the beep from the alarm had scared someone off before they got any further than that room, or something unknown had triggered the sensor. In either case, there was essentially no chance that we'd lost anything significant to thieves. If they'd come in through the laundry, they would have set off at least one other sensor before they got to a room that contained anything we cared about.

If we were saved from total panic, however, that did not mean we could return to relaxing and enjoying ourselves. After the stress of the day, the whole alarm thing had effectively shattered our nerves, and sabotaged any chance we had of relaxing and really enjoying the dinner. In the end, we ate and then paid the bill and headed home as quickly as we could.

As I had surmised, nothing was gone. In fact, there was no sign whatsoever of anything amiss. The laundry window was not broken. In fact, we were baffled because there was just no sign of whatever could have set off the alarm. Our speculation eventually settled on a spider as the likely candidate. Maybe some hulking huntsman wandered in and clambered over the sensor where it sits on the wall, setting it off a couple times as it lurched back and forth. That's only a semi-plausible guess, though, and we'll probably never know.

Anyway, crisis over, Anita and I are even more tired before. We just want to crawl in bed and collapse. Here's hoping we can actually sleep well!

Talkin' Java and Snow

2005-08-10T23:06:00.000+10:00

When I returned from JavaOne a month ago, I put together a slide show about the trends I saw in Java development and presented it to the 'Java Community of Practice', the developer support group I pushed to organise within IP Australia. Shortly after that I ran into Frank Van Praag, who apparently is the current head of the local Java user group (or 'JUG' as they're often called) that meets at the Sun offices up on Northbourne once a month.

Frank--whom I know from somewhere, but neither of us can pin down just where--called me back the next day to chat. I'd told him about the Java CoP at IPA, and mentioned how I'd always intended to attend the Canberra JUG myself, but just never made it. [Weird, in a way. I've been meaning to check out the local JUG ever since we moved back here over three years ago, but for various reasons it never happened. I'd even made the big effort once, about two years ago now, making the hike out to Turner to attend what I thought was the JUG meeting, only to discover that I had the date wrong! Fate, I guess. Anyway...] "So," Frank says, "I remember you told me you had done several presentations to your group there. How would you like to give one of them to the JUG? Our speaker for the next meeting cancelled, and I need a replacement."

That seemed like fate deciding it was time for me to make a meeting, so I signed up. Heck, I had the Java trends presentation ready to go, and I'd just given it for the second time a week before (Dan Collins had asked me to present it to the Enterprise Solutions team meeting.)

Well, Wednesday rolls around, and the weather is going south fast. News stations and the ABM are actually predicting snow, which is a real rarity in Canberra. We see a few flurries, maybe, once a winter or so. Oh, almost every winter there are a few weeks when you can see snow covering the tops of the Brindabellas off to the West and South, but it seldom makes it down into the city itself.

Today, however, was going to be one of those rare, weird exceptions. I hit around three in the afternoon. We (the Enterprise Architecture team) were sitting in a meeting over in Discovery House when we noticed it through the big picture windows. Snow. Not just a few flurries either. This was a full-on snowstorm like I hadn't seen since we'd left D.C. The ground wasn't cold enough for it to stick, at least not right away, but it was really coming down. Big, fat flakes swirling down on a brisk wind and so thick that they obscured the trees just across the parking lot.

Anita called while we were all standing around laughing at the show. The Mums' network in Chifley (and probably all over Canberra) was ringing around with the word: "It's snowing!" The kids were all piling out into yards and streets to see something that most of the younger ones had never seen before in their lives. The kids, naturally, thought it was just the coolest thing ever, and the adults were having a pretty good time, too. "A change is as good as a rest," as one of the more popular local sayings has it.

The mini-blizzard had stopped by the time I jumped in the car to head up to Sun. As expected, the snow had left no trace on the too-warm ground.

The presentation went about as well as I might have hoped. Not a big group, the JUG. I think it only numbered about 15 that night. They were rapt to hear somebody (even if it was just yours truly) try to sum up where the chaotic sea of technology known as Java was likely to move over the next year. I got several laughs with my commentary on various bits and pieces, and there was a reasonably animated discussion afterwards. I left with a warm glow.

Which I would need, as it turned out. The snow had started up again. Driving through snow at night is one of those experiences that take me right back to my childhood. I used to love staring out through the windscreen of our big old station wagon, watching as the speed of car made the snow that flew through our headlights look like the star field effect they used in the old Star Trek series when the ship was supposedly flying across the galaxy at warp speed. Seeing it again tonight, as I made my way through the wet streets of Canberra, was almost magical.

A Quick Study, Our Rohan

2005-08-10T01:31:00.000+10:00

This evening Anita drove over with R to pick me up at work. It was cold and occasionally spitting rain, so I decided I could forgo the exercise of the walk home.

Anyway, when I get in the car, Rohan starts up his usual refrain of "Do you have anything from your work I can borrow?"

I told him no, all I had was the usual, plus some books.

"What books?" he wanted to know.

"Computer books. Programming. Not story books." I told him.

Well, he supposed he'd have one of those. So I dug out a thick tome on a Java application framework and handed it back to him, waiting for him to complain.

In stead he calmly opens it up and begins paging through it, talking to himself as he goes.

"OK, this is how computers work. And this is how you do the programming. Yes, yes. And this is the screen and the keyboard."

I was, of course, nearly choking to death trying not to laugh out loud. He perused the book for the three or so minutes it took us to make it home, exclaiming aloud as he went. When we parked in the garage and climbed out of the car, he calmly handed it back to me.

"OK, dad, I've read it all. I'm ready to help you with your work now."

"Oh, OK." I said, "I could use the help."

"Let's go inside and turn on my computer so I can do some programming for you. Then I'll use the Internet page to send it to your computer."

"..."

I wonder if I can get him interested in the stock market. I need a good financial advisor, too.

The Medical Connection

2005-08-09T23:45:00.000+10:00

Canberra - One Degree of Separation, Episode 8,963

Mary Claire Tryon lives just up the street from us. Actually, she used to live just over the back fence from us, literally. Their house is directly behind numer 47, where we were renting until we bought this house. Anita first met her when Mary Claire looked over the fence and noticed that Rohan looked about the same age as their son, Marlon. We've been friends with her and Matt and their now two kids ever since.

So, I'm sitting at my desk this morning when I hear Sammy (that's Samantha Hoy, who sits just across the partition from me) talking on the phone.

"Hi, Mary Claire. I just wanted to check if he's running on time today. [pause] OK, I'll see you shortly. Thanks!"

I only noticed what she was saying because the name caught my ear. Now I'm thinking "How many Mary Claire's are there in Canberra?" when a couple of other things suddenly occur to me. One: it sounds like Sammy is checking on a doctor appointment. Two: Sammy is a breast cancer survivor. Three: Mary Claire works part time as a receptionist for an oncologist.

In any other city this would probably just be an interesting name coincidence, but this is Canberra, Secret Centre of the Universe, where everyone is separated by but one degree, so its a dead certainty this is not just a coincidence.

I stood up and said "Hi, Sammy. When you see Mary Claire, tell her I said 'Hi', OK?"

Sammy looks a bit startled for a moment, but she lives here too, so she's used to whole 'one degree' thing.

"Oh, you know her?"

"Yeah. Neighbor of ours."

"Oh, OK."

And I was right. Sammy reported later that Mary Claire said "Hi" back.

Oh, and just to close another loop, it turns out that on Saturdays, after swimming lessons, Twiggy takes Elyssa to a kids music lesson in Phillip, where by chance she's in the same class as... Marlon. Of course.

Things Are Going Swimmingly

2005-07-25T22:54:00.000+10:00

Canberra - One Degree of Separation, Episode 8,962

When I got back to my desk after a meeting this morning there was a phone message from the Aqua Harmony Swim School. I'd put Rohan on a waiting list there over six months ago, and a place had just opened up. I've been feeling guilty about not having him in swimming lessons before now, so this was great news. Well, apart from flashbacks to my own childhood trauma of swimming lessons in Denver, but I digress.

We'd hoped to get him into a Saturday morning class, so I could take him. The message says there is an opening on Monday mornings. Not good, but at the end she mentions that there may be other slots available as well.

So I try to call Anita, but she's on her phone to her Mum and asks if she can call me back. I'm chafing at the bit, worried that someone else will be offered the place if we don't call soon, so I tell her to call me back right away. When she does, of course, I've slipped my phone in my pocket with the ringer on 'low', so I don't hear the call! I end up calling her back when I finally think to check my phone. Anita suggests that I call and get more details, which I agree to do, but I can't just at that moment. More time goes by.

So I FINALLY sit down to call Aqua Harmony, thinking the signs are not good and this is all going to be a fiasco. But the woman on the other end is very pleasant, and tells me that, yes, there are a few options for days and times. She asks me to repeat Rohan's name for her, and our last name, while she looks for his information. She's repeating his name aloud as she looks.

At that point, in the near background of the phone call, I hear a woman's voice shout "WHAT?!? I DON'T BELIEVE IT!" There is a brief muffled conversation, and then the woman from Aqua Harmony comes back on the line.

"It seems your friend Twiggy is here, signing up Elyssa for the term." I can hear Twiggy laughing in the background.

My turn: "WHAT! I DON'T BELIEVE IT! Uh... tell Twiggy I said 'Hello'!"

"Well, Elyssa will be in the Saturday 10:15 class. Would you like to sign-up Rohan for the same session?"

"Saturday morning is available?!?" I almost shout.

"Yes"

"Well, uh... Is it a suitable class for him? He's never had lessons before."

"Yes, that's our class for beginning preschoolers. It would probably be good for him to have somebody he knows in the class, too."

Gee, ya think?

Fate, it seems, has taken a hand. All the delays in calling back meant I did so just as Twiggy was standing at the counter. What are the odds? In Canberra, almost 1. Tomorrow I'm going to have to call Twiggy and share a laugh about this one.

It turns out that Aqua Harmony is even open late tonight, so Anita picks me up after work and we go over and sign him up right away.

Two nights in a row I have a warm glow about how the Universe is working at the moment. Maybe this isn't such a bad Winter after all.

Last Man Standing

2005-07-24T23:53:00.000+10:00

Paul and Rachel just called. They're engaged!

The timing was, in retrospect, hilarious. Anita and I were having our typical evening in, planting ourselves on the sofa to watch the next Star Trek episode off a DVD rented from VideoEzy in Phillip. We're currently in the third season of Deep Space 9, and were watching an episode where Major Kira is in peril and Odo is struggling to save her. She orders him to leave her and save himself and, agonised, he tells her he can't because (pregnant pause) he's in love with her! Phone rings. No, seriously. Exactly at that line. Ask Anita.

Anyway, we had a great (if short) conversation with them to get all the relevant romantic details. Paul related how Rachel had always dreamt of honeymooning in Greece. So last night he took her out to a Greek restaurant, then for a walk in the nearby waterfront park. Beautiful night, apparently. When they finally found a bench, Paul waited for the right moment, told her he wanted to give her not just Greece, but all the days after, and popped the question. Paul, you sly dog. ;-)

We told them repeatedly how happy we are for them. And we are. By all reports Rachel is a great person, and I really want to see a sweet guy like my brother meet someone who is going to make him happy.

So we finished off the Star Trek episode feeling very warm and fuzzy about things in general. I told Anita it felt like, with that call, we'd turned the corner on this miserable flu-filled winter. We're looking forward, now, planning for our trip to D.C. for B and Terry's wedding and a long visit with friends and family.

Ah. Good times comin'.

The Mummy Wummies

2005-07-24T21:40:00.000+10:00

Tonight as I'm getting Small Boy ready for bed we had the following conversation...

Him: Where's Mum? I want her to put me to bed.
Me: Well, Mum still isn't feeling very well. She still has the flu.
Him: And she has the Mummy Wummies!
Me: The what?
Him: The Mummy Wummies. That's when there are these little bugs, and they're about this big [holds fingers about an inch apart] and they grow in your hair, and then they crawl down into your mouth and into your tummy, and then you're sick, and she has that.
Me: Oh. Well that sounds much worse than the flu.
Him: Yes. But I think she'll be better tomorrow.
Me: Well that's good to hear. Now let's put your pyjama top on.

Three year olds are a laugh riot, but four seems to trump it.

Looking Down from Above

2005-07-21T21:09:00.000+10:00

A link to Google's new maps of the Moon got me to finally wander over to Google Maps and have a look. I pulled up maps of Canberra and found our house, of course. Then followed a pre-set link to Market Street in San Francisco and located the Moscone Center (by looking for the Yerba Buena gardens which sit atop the North building). Finally I cruised over to Lorton, found the 123 bridge over the Occoquan, looked down on Rockledge Mansion where we were married, and then wandered the short distance up 123 to my parents house.

For whatever reason, I found myself feeling very sentimental. Looking at the two homes, one in Australia and one in Virginia, had me thinking back on events I had experienced in each place over the last ten years. When I stopped to think about it, I realised that each place stirred different emotions. Looking at our house in Canberra brought a smile, while looking at my parents house made me feel wistful, almost homesick. Something lost, something gained.

In a perfect world, I would be able to be a thousand places at the same time, never missing a moment of anything. Every minute of the day, some version of me, somewhere, would be just pulling up a chair around a kitchen table, chatting with an old friend about everything and nothing at all.

Within Cooee

2005-07-19T22:20:00.000+10:00

Damn, but I do love the Internet. "The Best Toy Ever" as I used to call it.

We now have everyone, bar Mom & Dad, connected to Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Two nights ago Anita and I used it to wish B a Happy Birthday. She doesn't have a mike at work, but she turned her PC camera on, so we had the amusing experience of watching her (as a series of stills) sitting at her desk somewhere around D.C. while we typed back and forth. Fun, and very funny.

Now I've got Al's kids, Nick and Tasha, pinging me for quick chats. Later that night it was Tasha, much to my surprise. I was expecting Nick, as he is usually the one using Al's account--so he can play World of Warcraft. After a minute of sorting out technical difficulties we got voice working and I got to have a short chat to my niece, thousands of miles away. Now THAT is cool.

Tonight it was Nick again, this time haranging me just for laughs. For posterity's sake, I hereby reprint the conversation in toto. (I'll have to remember this is here in 15 years or so, so I can pull it out and show it to him.)

njfedhero: hello chris I have talked to all my aunts and unlcles online they have all fallen to my evil waysnow it is time to fall i shall smite the with the hammer of the gods an though shall be defeted.................... ROFL
njfedhero: uh you there
njfedhero: EKKK
to_christopher: No, it is I who shall corrupt you, young Jedi...
njfedhero: you are great but not good enough for i am lord vaegie the great lord of doom for every strike you taste cheese on BROCLIE BLUE CHEESE MUHAHAHAHAHAH
njfedhero: NAD NO ONE CAN BE FANCY BY USING LETTER CHANGES ON I CAN
njfedhero: only*
njfedhero: uh ..... running out ideas well i think um your stupi yeah your satupid
to_christopher: LOL!
njfedhero: :-)
to_christopher: Actually, it's really, really late here, and I have to go to bed. Talk to you later?
njfedhero: so hows australia i spelled it right?
njfedhero: omg i forgot sorry
to_christopher: Yes, spelled right.
to_christopher: No worries, I'm just up late. Again.
njfedhero: what time is it? njfedhero: there?
njfedhero: 2 in the morning
to_christopher: 4:20 in the morning!
njfedhero: ROFL it just proves i care njfedhero: night MATE
to_christopher: :-))

Week of the Geek

2005-06-21T02:29:00.000+10:00

Well, the time approacheth. Saturday I fly out to San Francisco for JavaOne, the big annual conference for Java/J2EE developers. All I can say is...

Yeeeeeehaaaaaaa!!!

Baby, this is gonna be FUN! With a capital eff!

Hang out at Charlie's place on Saturday, catching up on life, the universe and everything. Head to the Moscone Center on Sunday to register and check out some of the pre-conference gatherings. Check into the swank hotel that the company is springing for. Spend the next four days, from (late) morning to (very late) night, eating, sleeping and breathing Java.

I hope to catch up with more people on Thursday night, maybe. Friday Mom & Dad fly in from D.C. so we can spend a day and a half... well, catching up again. Then a loooooooonnnnng plane ride home that dumps me back in Canberra just in time for work on Monday morning.

Oh yeah. Man, I'm even looking forward to the friggin plane ride. Fourteen hours with nothing to do but read, eat, sleep and watch bad movies. When you've spent four years in harness as parent, breadwinner and mortgage payer, the idea of being relieved of the possibility of being responsible for anything is pretty much the definition of paradise.

If this sounds like an orgy of selfish indulgence, it is indeed. Do I feel guilty about it? No.

Well, maybe. A little. And that only because Anita doesn't have a similar opportunity and probably won't for years. And, yes, she has the harder day job than I do by a good bit, so if life were fair I wouldn't be the one flying off for an all expenses paid trip overseas.

Geez, now I'm feeling guilty! Rats. I wonder if there is anything I can do to give her a break? There should be, shouldn't there. I mean, I may have to wait until R is just a little older, but if I had some assistance with the kid minding, there's nothing to prevent her going on a jaunt to visit old friends for a week or so.

Hmm. Have to work on that one. My flights are booked, and it aint to take a guilt trip, if you know what I mean.

Being Dad

2005-06-20T23:55:00.000+10:00

After four-and-a-bit years of practice, you'd think I'd be used to being a Dad by now. I'm not, and I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever really get comfortable with wearing that label.

By the way, this isn't about not wanting to be a father. Like most parents, my kid has become the most important thing in my life, and I can't imagine my life without him.

The problem is, I think, that I never really imagined my life with a child until it was too late! The day I became a father... well, I don't think I'd have been any more disoriented if I'd suddenly discovered I was the child of space aliens.

Why?

Well, I think it all has to do with self-image. For most of my life I was absolutely convinced that I never wanted to have kids. I wanted to become an independent free-wheeling jet setter type. I let that little fantasy go some time back, but that wasn't the source of my role confusion anyway. The problem was that I had never mentally pictured myself as a father. That was something that other people did. That older people did. Not me!

But here I am, dealing with a little guy who, to my delight and embarrassment, insists on thinking of me as his "Dad" and demanding that I play my part. I'm working my butt off to try and learn my lines, and I seem to be doing it well enough to fool the casual observer. I just can't seem to fool me into believing it.

I wonder how many other men there are out there like me. Confused, scared, but vaguely happy guys faking their way through "being Dad" and hoping nobody notices?

Funding NPR

2005-06-17T02:43:00.000+10:00

Yesterday Eric Baker posted to our circle-of-friends mailing list, pointing to an online petition being circulated by moveon.org protesting the Bush administrations plans to kill PBS and NPR. [For any Aussie readers out there, that's the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, which are roughly analogous to ABC TV and ABC Radio, respectively.] Eric's take, which I hope he won't mind me quoting, was...

I never bother to sign things like this, even to "save" Buffy, but killing PBS is just evil.

Agreed. However, Eric's post prompted a minor rant from my brother Al, which boiled down to NPR and PBS being redundant, their supporters elitist, and the whole thing a waste of taxpayers money. Well, as a card-carrying elitist NPR supporter, I couldn't let that one go, could I? So I wasted most of an evening throwing together a justification for public financing of news organisations. Not the best argument I've ever constructed, but (IMHO) not bad for a single-draft work.

Anyway, I like the core argument enough that I want to put it out there and invite people to tear it apart. If it has any fundamental flaws, I'll go back to the drawing board. If it holds up reasonably well, I'll have a better idea of where the weak spots are so I can refine my thinking.

[I should not that Al is working on his response to this as I type, so I'm guaranteed some solid (and sarcastic, and amusing) critical feedback anyway. However, working in software has taught me that critical reviews are like friends--there is a practical upper limit on how many you can deal with at one time, but having one is too few, and there really is no such thing as 'too many'.]

And so, without further ado...

Al,

I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't hold the opinions that you ascribe to 'NPR Snobs'. Rather, I think you hold opinions that I'd describe as characteristic of 'radical free-market' economic theorists and their advocates/allies in the U.S. Republican party. Long debate to be had here, but I believe this to be a thoroughly discredited view of economics that thrives (in the U.S., anyway) as an ideology-based 'belief system' rather than a rational and empirically tested model.

To make a very long story not short enough:

Economists working over the last couple have decades have shown conclusively that people are *not* the completely rational utility-maximising economic creatures that they are assumed to be in conventional market theory. [Many of the Nobel winners in the last decade or so were researching this.] If the actors in your economic model do not, in fact, behave in the way you assert they must, and your assumed behaviour model for these actors underpins your entire economic theory, then that means your entire economic theory is...? Hint: compound word starting with 'bull...'. ;-)

On the other hand, in the U.S., economic conservatives are working feverishly to make sure Americans embrace a key tenet of the radical free market belief system, which boils down to:

"Government doesn't need to do a damn thing, because if it is *really* of value to people then those people will pay for it and then the market will provide it!"

This is true only within the limited scope where conventional market theory holds true, and what we've discovered over the last several decades [or, rather, what real economists have discovered and 'ideological' economists are trying to make sure is never taken seriously or taught in American schools] is just how limited that scope is. There are enormous areas of any large economy where 'market theory' fails outright.

* The classic 'tragedy of the commons', where a shared resource (think: the environment) is inevitably destroyed because there is no 'profit' incentive to any individual actor to compel them to conserve it.

* The related, inverted situation where a needed resource (think: an educated workforce) is never produced in the first place because the ultimate consumer (the employers) see no profit for them in doing so. Remember, unless you allow indentured servitude, no employer has any guarantee that they will ever see a return on their investment in paying for schools. And, no, the workers themselves will not sustain a 'market' for education. Absent government intervention in the form of subsidies and loans, only the independently wealthy are able to 'purchase' an education. Removing government from the picture does not create a vibrant market for eduction, but instead over time leads to a degenerate situation in which a small, self-perpetuating elite own and run a very poor economy staffed by 'serfs'. Think: medieval Europe!

* Similar to, but subtly different from, the education issue is the 'infrastructure problem'. Absent government intervention, sea ports, roads, rail, airports (and air traffic control! ;-) and the like are either not built, or are built only as private toll-charging ventures (think about the medieval--there's that word again!--system of roads where you might be forced to pay someone every few miles... the inefficiencies are enough to reduce economic growth to almost nothing) and/or massive duplication results in further inefficiencies (see the history of rail, where competing private rail ventures were sometimes laying their track only meters away from their rivals over long stretches)

...and the list goes on. Getting back on-topic though...

I believe that 'news' economically resembles things like education, health care or sea ports. It is a kind of social or 'informational' infrastructure. But, similar to many other forms of infrastructure, there is not an efficient 'market' for it. Not the good kind. The news which is 'best' or 'most efficient/effective' for a society to have (clear, detailed, relatively free from bias, covering issues based on relevancy and immediacy rather than on 'entertainment' value) does *not* naturally emerge due to market forces.

This is not due to any supply constraints, but due to the nature of people. Most people are naturally lazy. They don’t *want* to think about the problems of the world. What they want is for the politicians to sort it all out for them and make the big bad world go away. Here, again, we have an example where the normal operation of 'market forces' would lead to a degenerate result. Democracy requires an educated and informed citizenry to function. In the absence of this, the system will eventually (but *inevitably*) suffer a critical failure, typically transitioning to a dictatorship as soon as the people are ignorant *enough* that a majority will vote for 'bread and circuses' offered by a nice tough Daddy President who promises to take care of everything else for them.

Hail, Caesar! Vive l'Bonaparte! Heil Hitler! And so on, ad nauseum. Repeat after me: "Those who do not learn from the past..."

So, contrary to what any free market theorist would have you believe, democracy actually *requires* the government to 'actively intervene' to produce citizens capable of sustaining that democracy. Education is part of it, but education must later be supplemented by all the *new* information that the citizen needs to know to make informed decisions. And many of those citizens are not going to do so unless you 'incentivise' them in some way. While the government of the day should not actively control the content provided to people, I believe that the government should actually be all but forcing people to keep learning about current affairs. State funded (not controlled, but funded) efforts to ensure that people remain 'current' in their education (call it 'news' if you will) is actually a mandatory duty of a democratic society.

Or so I would argue. But I'm radical that way... ;-)

I'm pretty sure we disagree on that this, and debating it could take days and more marshalling of evidence than I have the time to do, so we'll probably have to leave it at an impasse. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know where I was coming from, and that it was not the straw man position you had constructed as the 'NPR snob'.

I'm *much* more dangerous than that! I'm a neo-socialist!

;-)

My brother's initial response to this?

"Nuh-uh!"

Which left me ROTFLMAO.

Segway Sighting

2005-06-13T00:34:00.000+10:00

We took R to Questacon this afternoon. With the onset of the cold weather, the place was, as expected, completely packed with parents and kids.

[Have I mentioned Questacon here yet? I don't think so. Anyway, here's a link. We bought a two year family pass several months back, and what a bargain that has turned out to be. He loves the place, and must end up going there two or three times a month. Me, I love it too. Very geeky, in a fun-for-kids way.]

As we reached the desk to get our hands stamped, a staff member rolled out of the entrance to the exhibits on... a Segway! I'd never seen one in person before. Absolutely fascinating, if only because of how smooth the motion is and how easily he was able to maneuver in a crowd.

Damn, those things might be perfect for Canberra. Most people couldn't actually commute on them, but I could. And they'd be ideal for quick trips to the shops. Hmm.

OK, snap out of it! Don't need it! Want it, yes. Need it? No.

We also made it up to the new science of sound and music exhibit at the top of the ramp. Neat, but too crowded, and something of a let-down for me after having had my technolust button pushed before we ever made it in the door. Ah, well.

Kicking the habit

2005-06-08T00:41:00.000+10:00

A month ago I went to see my doctor, Karen Jenkins, to talk to her about finally coming off of Efexor. Things were 'going well' and I decided now was as good a time as any to make the move. I did two more weeks on the usual 15os before switching to taking 75s.

My system was not happy. I had two or three days of those unpleasant 'electric shock' sensations I experienced whenever I was late in taking my usual doseage. That finally faded, but then I rapidly sank into what I thought was a recurrance of my old nemesis, the Winter Funk. For a few days at the end of the second week on the 75s it was all I could do to make myself get out of bed in the morning.

Now, the Winter Funk and general anxiety were the two things I'd wanted to get rid of by going on Efexor, and I had. If one or both of them were to come rushing back as soon as I tried to kick the SSRI habit, then I was in trouble. Karen's warning that some people were simply unable to get off of SSRIs without experiencing relapses floated back into my mind... and that wasn't making me feel any better, I have to tell you.

Last Sunday was the final day of my two week experiment on the 75s. By Saturday I had decided it wasn't going to work--at least, not this time--and that on Monday I'd go back to the standard 150s. But then...

I woke up on Sunday feeling better than I had in days. I put it down to relief and having made a decision on the pills and told myself I'd better get on with some of the work I'd let pile up when the Funk came upon me. The surprising bit was that I did exactly that: got on with things. Sometime in the mid-afternoon I paused for minute and realised what I was doing. I'd been racing around the house, moving from task to chore, getting more done that I had in the previous two weeks. And... I was enjoying it!

Too weird, I thought. Let's see if it lasts for more than a few hours.

It did. I went to bed that night feeling better than I had in ages. Even better than I had most of the time I was taking the 150s.

I pondered this the next morning, Monday, as I was getting ready for work. I still felt good. Apparently the past two weeks were not a 'relapse', but a reaction to coming off of the higher dosage. If that was the case...

I decided to take a chance and revert to my original plan for getting off of the pills. That meant that Monday was the first day of going cold turkey. I'd try it for a couple of days and see what happened. I could always change my mind.

I survived Monday in reasonably good shape. I started feeling the 'electric shock' sensations about 9:30, about an hour after I would ordinarily have taken a pill. It built up through the day, but was bearable.

The good news was, as uncomfortable as I was physically, my mood didn't change. I was still as confident and motivated as I'd been the day before, tempered to some extent by the physical discomfort and worries about what else might appear over time. (I did NOT want to go through another week and a half of the Funk again.) I went to bed that night feeling physically awful and mentally upbeat--a rare combo for yours truly.

The trouble was, I couldn't sleep. The sensations were intense enough that I could not relax. And when I did nod-off, I would wake only a few minutes later, gasping for air. I eventually decided that this must be a form of sleep apnia, an unexpected and unpleasant new withdrawl symptom. Or so I hoped. Hey, withdrawl symptoms eventually go away.

I finally fell asleep about six in the morning. Anita woke my a couple of hours later, and I no more than lifted my head off the pillow before deciding there was just no point in trying to fight my way into work. I asked her if she would call Daryl (my boss at IP Australia) for me, and collapsed again. This time I don't think I woke up until after noon, and when I did wake up I wished I hadn't. I felt like crap. But! Still no sign of the Funk--or the anxiety--so far, so I resolved to continue the experiment.

By this evening the symptoms were easing a bit, and after a long hot shower I began to feel something akin to 'normal'. I'm not sure if I'll make it through this or not, but if at all possible I'm going to try to stick it out for two weeks, as I did with the step reduction to the 75s. If I make it that far, I'm likely to have outlasted all withdrawl symptoms.

The two things that would be most likely to cause me to abandon the project are either another return of the Funk or the emergence of more serious physical symptoms. I still have to work and be a Dad and a Hubby, which is going to take some doing if I sink back into depression or am getting little or no sleep at night. I can handle a day like today for another day or two at most before I'd have to give up. I'm not going to risk my job performance or my relationship with my family just to succeed right now, especially since I can always try this again later.

That said, I really do not want to go throught this lovely withdrawl process more than once. I have a gut feeling that, if I can just make it to Thursday, I'll be in the clear. Here's hoping.

Gee, modern medicine is so much fun! ;-)

Paul has a WHAT?!?!

2005-06-02T22:36:00.000+10:00

As we're sitting in the study this evening, peering at our respective computers, Anita suddenly shouts (literally) "He WHAT?!?"

I'm just quietly gazing at a web site or something, so her exclamation, coming from directly behind me, catapults me out of my chair. I turn around to find Anita reading an email. So now I'm worried, half expecting her to tell me something dreadful has happened. Instead, she peers around at me with a bemused grin on her face and says (calmly this time), "Did you know that Paul has a girlfriend?"

It turned out that Paul was not exactly announcing this news to the world. He'd just off-handedly mentioned in an email to the City of Heros crew that he woud be unable to play one night because "June 7th is my girlfriend's birthday".

Yeah, right. Like we'd let him get away with THAT.

I dialled his office. He picked up with his formal "at work" voice on.

"This is Paul Macias."

"GIRLFRIEND? WHAT GIRLFRIEND?"

"Chris?!?"

"Yeah. Of course it's me. What, you thought you could just slip that out there, did you?"

It was good to talk to him. Amusing, too. Our homey Eric is, of course, married to Rachel, a vegetarian who is originally from Maine. So Paul, of course, has managed to get involved with a vegetarian from Maine whose name is Rachel. As Paul said, what are the odds?

Damn high, for our little band of adventurers. Things just seem to work that way, don't they.

Glenn and I get serious

2005-05-26T22:52:00.000+10:00

Last night I met Glenn (Smyth) in Civic for dinner. We'd agreed a couple of weeks back that it was time to sit down and discuss getting serious about writing an article--or even a book--on enterprise architecture (hereafter abbreviated as 'EA').

Well, after dinner at the Grail we moved on to coffee at Starbucks, and over the course of about three hours of rants, laughs and sketching we managed to convince ourselves that this was worth doing and, more importantly, that we wanted to do it.

Early in the piece I suggested that, before we dove into the minutiae of the subject, we step back and discuss why each of us would want to (or not want to) commit the time and effort needed to tackle a project like this. It turned out we both had the exact same perspective. While we might have some altruistic motivation--we could help other enterprise architects by publishing what we know--and to some extent it might be 'fun' to do it, neither of these motivations would be enough, in themselves, to lure us into it.

What we both want is, frankly, a big career payoff. If we can complete this, and if we can get it published, and if we can get attention for it in the right circles, and if that leads to widespread notice and acceptance of our work, then we might--just might--manage to ascend to the godlike plane of the uber-consultants who are able to live fabulously well off of management consulting gigs and speaking fees. In short, we want to steal John Zachman's reputation and livelihood.

It's there for the taking. The field is dominated by Zachman's eponymous 'framework', with TOGAF (The Open Group Architectural Framework) running a distant second. Both are extremely weak and poorly thought-out. Both are extremely 'heavyweight'--demanding that the practitioner assemble and maintain an enormous volume of information--to the point of being completely impractical. Neither gives much thought to the fact that some types of information have a much higher utility than others. Neither has a clear methodology that provides 'best practice' for developing the content. Neither defines a clear, consistent set of deliverables. Neither explains how to establish and maintain traceability through the information ("How can we be sure that the organisation's strategic objectives are actually being supported by our software strategy?", "Where did that business rule come from, and where is it implemented in code?"). Neither has a solid story to tell about integrating EA with the 'downstream' work of software purchasing activities or software development activities.

And so-on and so-on.

We talked it over from several different angles and managed to re-convince ourselves that we had both a better approach to EA, and solid answers for most of the issues where Zachman and TOGAF fall short. The only open question is: do we have the time and the wherewithal to do what it takes? Not just to produce something, but to have a reasonable chance at converting our approach into a successful career opportunity?

Dunno. But we're going to give it a try.

We decided the first order of business was to scope things by working-up a draft table of contents for a proposed book on the subject. Whether we go the book route or not, hammering out the scope in this way makes sense to us. We also need to assemble and discuss all the bits and pieces of information each of us has accumulated over the last couple of years. Anything we've done that might add to the scope or fill-in part of the content. That's probably the next task. We also talked about who we might leverage as early reviewers. Mostly senior Tax people who can evaluate it from the business (senior exec) side.

I just wish we knew some other developers who had written technical books and were willing to advise us on how to go about it. We're new at this, and we know it. So we're going to wing it for a while until we have a better idea how to proceed. Fingers crossed here.

Glenn is buried in Change Program work as usual. His plan is to have a serious look at this while he's home for his four or five weeks of 'paternity' leave once the baby is born. I'm going to keep plugging-away as I find time, trying to capture the things I'm figuring out as we work through issues at IP Australia. Not a flying start, but it'll do. For now.

Happy 40th Wendy!

2005-05-23T01:36:00.000+10:00

Hi All,

...and especially Wendy! We tried to give you a quick call at 10 AM (your time) to wish you a Happy Birthday, but no answer, so we assume you were still out partying from the night before. As usual! No wonder you're always exhausted. You'd better lay off those all night raves or you'll never make it to 50.

Ah, well. Have a good one, and we'll try to call again soon.

I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. We're doing well. The cold weather finally set in this week, with the temperatures dropping near freezing overnight, but the days are sunny and pleasant, with highs in the mid-60s.

Today (Sunday) we took Rohan to scout out a public park we'd been told about by one of the other Mum's at his preschool. It's down in Kambah, the suburb just on the other side of Mt. Taylor from us. Turned out to be a real find. It has an amazing variety of equipment scattered over an area about the size of two football fields. Much of it is stuff I've never seen in a public park before, including two real Flying Foxes and various other 'military obstacle course-like' stuff.

It was all low-to-the-ground enough that 5 year olds were playing on it, but 'real' enough that the dads were finding excuses to play on it themselves. R was a bit nervous about some of it, but I suspect that a few visits without bigger kids around and he'll be tearing around with the rest. We actually ran into Sophia, the little girl from his class whose Mum told us about the park, and she dragged R off to see everything, with us following. It was very cute watching the two of them hold hands as they walked between pieces of equipment, then turn into screaming maniacs when they arrived at something new.

After that we took Anita's Mum for a sightseeing drive out to the Deep Space Tracking Station at Tidbinbilla, about 20 minutes west of Canberra. It's one of the three Earth stations (the others are in Spain and the U.S.) that NASA uses to stay in communication with space probes, such as the Mars rovers and the current Cassini mission to Saturn. We hadn't been out there since Mom, Dad and Paul were visiting two and a half years ago (can it really have been that long?!?). Beautiful day for it, too. We could have had a couple of really dramatic photos... if we'd thought to bring a camera.

The sun is setting at 5 PM these days, so we allowed R to coerce us into going to the MacDonalds in Weston for dinner. Then it was home to start the evening "chase the boy off to bed" ritual, after which the three adults collapsed in front of the TV for our regular Sunday evening viewing of NCIS. A pleasant way to end a long day.

So, Wendy, we did manage to celebrate your 40th in style. The only thing missing was you and the rest of the family, but we were thinking of you!

Love, Christopher

P.S. Mom, Dad, my corporate AmEx card finally(!) turned up, and I'll be contacting my company tomorrow (Monday) to start making the arrangements for JavaONE. I'll call or email you when I know more.

Tiny Disco

2005-05-14T17:41:00.000+10:00

Last night (Friday) the Parent's Committee hosted a 'Disco Nite' for the kids at Chifley Preschool. About half the parents showed up (most of the Committee members plus a few) and with the younger and older siblings tagging along there were about 15 kids running around between the school room and the darkened yard.

It turned out to be a good night for it. The weather was cool. Not too bad but, as is usual for this time of year, the night was clear and you could feel the temperature steadily dropping. The parents pulled several of the little plastic chairs into a semi circle around the barbie, which was outside by the sandpit, and sat there chatting while the kids amused themselves. I spent most of the time talking to Brendan (a.k.a. "Jackie's husband" or "Curtis' Dad") about life at the ATO.

The evening was really about getting rid of all the excess sausages and diced onions left over from the fund raising Fete last Saturday. In that regard it would have to be considered a failure. We all dutifully stuffed ourselves on 'snags', but found we still had a string of sausages left over the length of which could have been measured in parsecs.

The kids had fun though. Rohan had insisted on bringing a torch along, and led several small expeditions around the fence perimeter. We finally bundled him off home about nine, when Anita noticed that his efforts at 'dancing' were wilting away to a tired shuffle.

We were both speculating on what he might look like dancing at B and Terry's wedding. I think we're half expecting a reprise of my nephew Nick's manic disco performance at our wedding back in '99. The though brought a mixture of amusement and... I don't have a word for it. It was somewhere between sentimental reflection on the past and a contemplation of how events sometimes seem to repeat themselves. Do the Freudians have a word for it, I wonder?

Hard Scrabble

2005-05-02T01:28:00.000+10:00

Anita and Mum have conned me into playing Scrabble in the evenings. Mum won the first night, and I eked out a win in the second. Turns out this was a clever rope-a-dope ploy by Anita, the Scrabblemeister, who promptly clobbered us for the next three nights in a row.

I am once again in Scrabble hell. My wife has many wonderful talents, but winning graciously at Scrabble is not among them. I'm going to have to find a way to avoid playing again, as the consequences of another Anita victory do not bear thinking about. I'm sure any fair minded jury would let me off, but how would I explain it to Rohan?

Oh, that reminds me of another Rohan story I have to record. Last night we were playing Fireman Sam again. (We're always playing Fireman Sam these days.) R declares that he (in the role of Firefighter Penny Morris) needs to build a fire in the fireplace. But he needs to dress appropriately first. The fire might make him cold--don't ask me; it's four-year-old logic here-- so he wants to wear a "cozy warm jumper" while he makes it.

Then he declares that I (a.k.a. Station Officer Steele) will need to help him. Obviously he's not sold on Station Officer Steele's fire tending skills, though, as he promptly slaps his bright red firefighter's hat on and announces "I will wear my firemans hat in case you make a mistake and burn my head."

Oh. OK.

Mum arrives, and I network like crazy

2005-04-29T23:54:00.000+10:00

Nothing too creative this time. I'm too tired. I'll just try and get down what's been happening, for the record.

Anita's Mum is up from Melbourne, staying with us for five weeks. We picked her up on Sunday afternoon and she's happily ensconced in our (aptly named now) granny flat. I used to jokingly refer to it as the Astrid Rodrigues Suite -- a joke I'll have to revive now that she's actually resided there for a time.

I'm happy she's here. I've always gotten along well with Mum, and it's good to have family around. She enjoys playing with Small Boy and he obviously thinks she's the bees knees. And having someone else around to look after him from time to time gives Anita and I some extra time to get things done (or collapse). We just have to track things so that we can rescue 'Nanny' when Rohan starts to get too manic for her to keep up with him.

Fortunately, Mum can always retreat to the flat when she wants some down time. Anita was predicting that having the separate granny flat would make a big difference when we have guests, since they would have a place to 'get away to'. She was right, and it is absolutely brilliant. When Jan and Margo were visiting a for a week over the school holidays I never felt that 'guest stress' that usually creeps in after a couple of days if you are all living on top of each other. That flat is the best feature of this house.

Work has been a minor roller coaster ride. Last week I was trying to work it out to go along with Daryl [my immediate boss in the Architecture group] and Geoff King to a seminar being given by John Zachman--of the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture--in Melbourne. I primarily wanted to go to avoid Darryl and Geoff becoming mesmerised by Zachman and his silly framework, but QCOM (well, Ron King, the boss) made trying to arrange it such a damn pain that over last weekend I convinced myself I was better off just pulling out and trusting things to the Gods.

The upside of that decision (and, truth be told, a contributing factor in it) was that I was not forced to cancel the long-planned 'boys night out' with Glenn and Matt Y on Wednesday. With Mum in town to help her look after Smalley, Anita was happy to let me go. Well, 'happy' might be an exaggeration, but she was in good humour about it and even ran me into town so I didn't have to catch the bus.

We met for drinks at the Grail, and kabitzed about work (mostly thier work at the ATO of course!) for a couple of hours and about four pints, then wandered over to the Woodstock Pizza near Garema Place for a late dinner. Glenn is still stressed, as usual, but doesn't look like he's coming apart at the seams or anything. Interestingly, though, he admitted that he'd seriously starting thinking about how long he was willing to deal with the imminent disaster that is the Change Program. He claims he's going to see how things are after he's back from the eight weeks leave he's taking when Linda has the baby. I'm not convinced he really would ever pull the plug, but... maybe.

Matt is looking surprisingly well, given that he's trying to sort out Superannuation and a half-dozen other smaller catastrophes. I think the role suits him. Just the day before he'd met with Gary P, the new Unisys business development guy I'd pointed to him, and Gary was suitably impressed. I'd told Gary that I thought Matt was good enough to be a reasonable bet as a future Commissioner of Taxation, and I realised as I said it that I believe that. The thing most likely to make him drop out of the running is the soul-draining political gamesmanship he'd have to put up with if there isn't a regime change in the IT side.

On Tuesday at IP Australia there was some big meeting of all the players involved in the product upgrade project. Daryl came back from it nearly busting to tell me about it. Apparently this was where the penny finally dropped for Gossie (Ian Goss, the CIO -- and by the way, will I be glad when I've been doing this long enough that I don't have to identify new characters in parethesised asides every paragraph or so, but I digress) about just how big that effort was slated to be, and how, if you added that on top of the scope of the PAMS 10.2 release and the expected legislatively driven work we'll have to tackle on PAMS later this year, the IT pipe was going to be clogged with expensive-but-necessary 'tactical' deliveries for as far as the eye could see. So much for a development 'pause' and looking for a new direction. The reality is that he will not be able to really embark on any 'strategic' initiatives for two or three years.

Dan Collins (Daryl's boss, head of Enterprise Solutions, and the guy who is now effectively my real boss since he decided to sponsor me to lead the development of our enterprise architecture instead of Daryl) dropped 'round while Daryl was regaling me with the tale. He'd been at the meeting, too, and it had raised a big question for him: was there any value in doing the enterprise architecture now, if we weren't going to need a strategic planning framework for a couple of years? Uh oh!

I was surprisingly (to me, anyway) calm when he raised this. I think I've achieved a kind of internal Zen mind about this sort of thing. I'm versatile enough--and well enough regarded in IP Australia--that they aren't going to ghetto-ize me just because the EA dropped off the priority list. I told him that, frankly, the EA wasn't going to provide a lot of value if there were no strategic IT decisions to be made for a while. We tossed scenarios around for a little while--including the likelihood that the work being done on PAMS would turn into another costly fiasco and prompt yet another 'pause to reassess', in which case the EA could suddenly become very relevant--at the end of which Dan said he was going to take it up with Gossie and see how he felt about it.

The really interesting bit about this was that, when he got back to me on Wednesday, the report was that Ian was in fact happy to pursue the development of the EA even if we would have to shelve the thing for two years when it was completed. Huh. OK. So we had a couple of conversations to tinker with how we would go forward, and agreed we would be able to launch into it in earnest next week when Daryl and Geoff were back and the ARIS tool would be installed and ready for use.

Friday afternoon I had a one-on-one discussion with Peter Cornish (member of the IPA executive, head of the Customer Operations Group (COG), and a not-quite-recovered IT nerd whose technical knowledge, tall thin build and nervous, twitchy manerisms kept reminding me of Glenn, much to my amusement) scheduled at my request. We met in the Sirius Cafe, got coffees, and grabbed a table inside to avoid the cool breeze. My real agenda was to better understand him, and try to establish a personal rapport with him, as he will be our key supporter on the Exec. Mission accomplished on that front, I'd say. We got along well, and talked for well over an hour and a half.

He also gave me some key insights on how to proceed with the EA around the Exec. Basically, drop the subject and wait until we've put real points on the board before anouncing that the EA strategy was how we were scoring them. He also suggested that Gossie was supporting it (a) because he knew EA was a big buzzword in IT circles and was concerned that we had to be doing one, even if he didn't know exactly why, and (b) perhaps also because he (Goss) was hoping that the EA would help him to understand what exactly was going on in the organisation he'd reluctantly agreed to head up.

Ian once said in a meeting with me that he himself wondered why they hadn't made Peter the CIO instead of him. I'm pretty sure I know why. It turns out Peter only joined IPA about 11 months ago. That means they gave it to Gossie because they felt Peter was too new. Assuming the top guy likes him, Peter will get the job when Gossie moves on, after he's 'had time to develop a better understanding of the business'.

OK, deep breath...

It's late. I've ranted on about work related crap for so long that writing anything about Rohan would seem like it was an afterthought. So I'll skip news about R for tonight and post just about him next.

Anchovies and chili flakes

2005-04-23T12:25:00.000+10:00

Friday night was pizza night for us. Once again Dominos tried to give us a Roast Garlic and Olive Supreme pizza sans garlic, but this time I checked at the counter. One of the girls assembling the pizzas was at the counter almost before I had the box open asking if something was wrong, and she quickly took it back to add the missing ingredient. You had to wonder if she knew the stuff wasn't on it, and if there was some bizarre scheme afoot to deprive customers of bad breath or something.

Anyway, once we had the pizza home and were diving in, I fetched the anchovies from the fridge for myself and Anita. Rohan saw them and, as he did last time, demanded some for himself. I fished one out (pun intended) and put it on his plate. He picked it up and popped it in his mouth. Not on the pizza, mind you, but just down the hatch, without so much as a blink, as though it were simply an hors deouvres. Anita and I just chortled. The nut did not fall far from the tree. No indeed.

Then he announces that his pizza isn't hot enough. It needs chili flakes. Actually, he wanted to add cinnamon first, but we dissuaded him. We gave in on the chili flakes, figuring he would learn a lesson. I fetched the bottle from the pantry and he shakes a small mound of the stuff onto his slice of Godfather Classic Crust and proceeds to devour it calmly, stopping only for the occasional drink of water. After I recovered, I turned to him with a mock-sad face, wiped away an imaginary tear and told him "Your grandfather would be so proud..."

He thought that was funny, but wasn't quite sure why.

Hello... hello... is this thing on?

2005-04-23T05:37:00.000+10:00

Picking up hookers instead of my pen
I let the words of my youth slip away
- Willie Nelson "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys"

That line popped into my head as I was filling-in the forms to register with blogger.com. Must be guilt over how often I've thought "I should write that down..." and haven't.

(Sheesh. Quoting Willie at the top of my first real blog entry. That's going to pull in the crowds, all right.)

I've been meaning to do this forever, it seems. Now, with TabletPC in hand, wireless access to my broadband connection, and this site ready and waiting, the only thing missing is words.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
- Confucius